Welcome to Salon Nouveau. Inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s salon littéraire, I hereby invite you to my own humble salon, where I’ll be writing about both my daily life in Paris and a work of art I’m currently engaging with. My hope is that together we can build a virtual 21st century Parisian salon, where, like Mallarmé and his friends, we can share conversations about art and miscellaneous news to inspire each other. Since Mallarmé hosted his at his place every Tuesday, I’ll do my best to make this space as evocative of our book-lined apartment as possible. (By the way, Mallarmé was an English teacher, too, not that I would ever dare compare myself to such brilliance…).
To introduce myself briefly, I’m a writer and amateur soprano who has lived in Paris for twelve years. I’m originally from Northeastern Pennsylvania, which I write about a lot, and am a proud dual French citizen. I’ll let the rest of my story unfold in our salons.
This weekend marks the beginning of the spring vacances scolaires here in Paris. The trees are turning a vibrant, neon green, and the days are getting longer. As my husband and I entered La Sainte-Chapelle on Friday night, light was still coming through its magnificent stained-glass windows. It was our first time attending the Sainte Chapelle Opera Festival, and the divine French soprano Julie Fuchs and pianist Alphonse Cemin offered us a truly magical evening. While I love going to the opera, recital singing has my whole heart: I love the intimacy with the music and the musicians, as though you’re having an intense, one-on-one conversation. I left feeling alive and inspired, feelings I hope you can share at home thanks to Fuchs’s Instagram, where she has posted her performance of Susanna’s aria from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.
This week, I’d like to discuss a piece I’m currently working on for an upcoming recital of my own in June1: “Absence” from Les Nuits d’été by Hector Berlioz (1841), based on poems by Théophile Gautier. Though my love affair with French mélodies started way back in my late teens, this is the first Berlioz piece I’ll perform, which I am very excited about.
Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits d’été is one of the first examples of the French mélodie genre, that is, a poem sung with accompaniment. The poems come from Théophile Gautier’s collection La Comédie de la mort, published in 1838. Originally composed for voice and piano, Nuits d’été is most well-known today for its orchestral setting that Berlioz completed between 1843 and 1856. Both Berlioz’s setting and Gautier’s poems are lovely examples of Romanticism: emotion and nature are at the heart of the aesthetic.
“Absence” is the fourth song of six and calls for a departed lover’s return. My own translation is below; for our purposes, I’ve privileged vocabulary over sound and meter. Berlioz only used the first three stanzas of the original poem, and used the first as a refrain, repeated after the second and third:
Reviens, reviens, ma bien-aimée ;
Comme une fleur loin du soleil,
La fleur de ma vie est fermée
Loin de ton sourire vermeil !
Entre nos coeurs quelle distance !
Tant d’espace entre nos baisers !
Ô sort amer ! ô dure absence !
Ô grands désirs inapaisés !
D’ici là-bas, que de campagnes,
Que de villes et de hameaux,
Que de vallons et de montagnes,
À lasser le pied des chevaux.
Come back, come back, my beloved;
Like a flower far from the sun,
The flower of my life is closed
Far from your ruby smile!
What distance between our hearts!
What space between our kisses!
O cruel fate! O harsh absence!
O great unfulfilled desires!
Between here and there, only countryside,
Only towns and hamlets,
Only valleys and mountains,
To tire the hooves of horses.
Let’s first observe how gorgeous Gautier’s poem is. I adore the imagery of the lines “Comme une fleur loin du soleil / La fleur de ma vie est fermée.” I can visualize the closed flower, far from the sun, longing to be opened. In the third stanza, the bird’s eye view of the landscapes separating the speaker from their lover is so beautifully Romantic. For non-French speakers, there is an ABABCDCDEFEF rhyme scheme that exudes a lovely musicality on its own. I also love the exclamation points in the poem that have, hélas, gone out of style these days.
The first time I heard Berlioz’s setting, I kept the recording on repeat for several days, as though with each play I myself were trying to conjure the lover’s return. How did Berlioz achieve such drama and intensity?
In the score, Berlioz wrote two quarter rests (each with a fermata) right after the first line that calls out to the absent lover, creating a haunting silence that emphasizes her “Absence.” Then, the speaker (literally) takes a breath to sing with a soft pianissimo in the piano accompaniment, before building into a crescendo on the third line of the poem: “The flower of my life is closed / Far (mezzo-forte) from your ruby smile (a resigned diminuendo and decrescendo at the end of the line).” With these dynamic markings, we follow the speaker’s emotional journey, mirroring those valleys and mountains in the third stanza of the poem.
The speaker’s agitation is written so organically in the music that it feels like we’re in his mind, a musical first-person narration. I’ll conclude with Berlioz’s ingenious final repetition of the first stanza. Unlike the two other times the first two words are sung, which start mezzo-forte, this last time the speaker calls out for his lover in a devastating pianississimo. He then sings “Like a flower far from the sun” so softly, as though finally realizing the lover is not coming back. The crescendo starts again in one last fit of restlessness, before the piece ends on a haunting piano.
I love this piece because I have felt these feelings before—and how utterly exquisite it is to find them so beautifully expressed.
While scholars are divided on the theory, some say Berlioz orchestrated “Absence” for his lover, Marie Recio, who would become his second wife. So, she did come back! I guess sometimes in real life things turn out better. That said, he was already married to someone else at the time… In fact, some argue that the music can be interpreted as a painful adieu to his first wife, Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
I’ll leave you with my favorite recording of “Absence,” which is the orchestral setting with the wonderful French singer Véronique Gens. I’ve had the immense privilege of seeing her live at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for a program of mélodies with orchestra some time back, and at a fantastic recital at the Musée d’Orsay of Reynaldo Hahn (we absolutely will have to discuss him at some point—and Véronique Gens, too!).
Dear Salon Nouveau friends, what do you think of this piece? Of Berlioz, Gautier, Gens, Fuchs? I’d love to discuss.
Merci à tous, et à la prochaine !
Rachel
If you’re in Paris, I’ll be singing in a joint recital with a wonderfully talented baritone and pianist on June 7th and 9th. The group recital I organize, Un Voyage lyrique, will also be happening on June 21st. All performances are at Studio l’Accord Parfait in the 18e.
This is one of the first French art songs I ever listened to (and really liked). Berlioz's music is just beautiful!