Jean Cras, Polymath of Music and Letters (review)

This is the first substantial study of the life and work of one of France's 'many forgotten masters' (p. 191), a talented composer and rear admiral in the French navy whose death in 1932, marked by a state funeral, 'distressed [France] profoundly' (p. 119). The first six chapters situate Cras's family life, successful naval career, and musical activities within the Third Republic politics of nation building and colonial expansion. Born into a Breton family, Cras was a staunch Republican and a devout Catholic, and, while his faith informed his music throughout his life — 'It is impossible for me to separate Art from God', he wrote in 1901, aged 22 (p. 125) — he distanced himself from regionalist ideology. This pioneering, thorough study is an impassioned attempt to launch further research on Cras, a favourite student of Henri Duparc, who called him 'le fils de mon âme' (p. 71). Bempéchat focuses at length on Cras's literary influences and his sensitive settings of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Symbolists such as Rodenbach, Samain, and Sylvestre, the spiritual love poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and Franz Toussaint's French translations of Omar Khayyam. He divides Cras's musical evolution into five distinct phases, charting his progression from Franckian disciple, via post-Romanticism and Impressionism, to the personal eclecticism of his later compositions, which incorporated elements of folk music heard in Brittany, North Africa, and Senegal. The score of each of Cras's published works is analysed in detail, and numerous quotations from five volumes of unpublished correspondence illustrate Cras's ideas on form, artistic genius, faith, and aesthetics. The centrepiece, both of Cras's career andthisstudy, is the opera Polyphème, a setting of Samain's dramatic poem on unrequited love, which catapulted Cras to 'the zenith of French musical life' (p. 353) and provides evidence, for Bempéchat, that Cras was 'the leading French neo-classicist of his generation' (p. 284). The musicological analysis remains closely bound to autobiographical detail, but this is a symptom, perhaps, of the l'homme-et-l'œuvre approach through which any effort to expand the canon inevitably passes; thus, for the author, the symphonic suite Journal de bord (1927) represents 'the amalgam of the composer's and the sailor's life' and 'narrates his very being' (p. 445), while the 'autobiographical' Piano Concerto (1931) provides 'a complex incarnation of his life's cycle' (p. 495). Cras'soriginalityissaidtolie notinhisharmonic language but in a rather vague 'aesthetic of the soul' (p. 285), a 'spiritual complexity and intensity' (p. 289); nonetheless, Bempéchat's detailed analyses succeed in challenging what he sees as 'many musicologists' systematic failure to properly grasp or appreciate the subtleties of French Impressionist music' (p. 455). It is perhaps the conservative neoclassicism of Cras's music that has since caused him to be relegated to the sidelines in a French musical landscape dominated by Franck, Debussy, and Ravel. Although Cras's writings make clear that he is no Debussy, his work certainly deserves rediscovery; Bempéchat sees in Fontaines, settings of poetry by Cras's friend Lucien Jacques, 'one of the crown jewels of twentieth-century song cycles' (p. 365), and considers the virtuosic String Trio (1926)'amongthe pillars of the twentieth century's chamber music' (p. 407), 'destined to become a staple of the string repertory' (p. 422). With a chronological list of compositions, reviews, and encyclopedia entries on Cras, as well as bibliographies on Brittany, French military history, and musicology, this excellent study should serve as the catalyst for some exciting new research into French musico-poetics of the early twentieth century.