Amédée-Ernest Chausson (20 January 1855 – 10 June 1899) was a French romantic composer who died just as his career was beginning to flourish.
La légende de Sainte Cécile, Op. 22 (1891)
Drame en trois actes
Libretto: Maurice Bouchor (1855-1929
Isabelle Vernet, François Le Roux, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris conducted by Jean-Jacques Kantorow
Description by Adrian Corleonis [-]Though almost wholly forgotten today, Chausson’s old law school chum Maurice Boucher articulated Romanticism’s “dying fall” — the era known as “the Nineties,” though it extends a decade either way — in a manner paralleled by Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson across the Channel. Chausson’s “answer” to the Liebestod, for instance, drew on two poems by Boucher describing the efflorescence and death of a seaside romance for his sumptuously impassioned soprano vehicle, the Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer, which occupied him from 1882 until 1890, and which he continued to revise into the 1890s. Indeed, Chausson’s first composition seems to have been a setting of Boucher’s “Lilas.” Boucher’s verse also offered matter for the characteristic Quatre mélodies, Op. 8, composed through the 1880s, while his translations were set in the four Chansons de Shakespeare, Op. 28, which followed through the 1890s. And it was Boucher’s translation of The Tempest, produced at the Théâtre des Marionettes in 1888, for which Chausson provided an extensive score of exquisite, ravishing incidental music. Boucher’s involvement with the suddenly fashionable Théâtre des Marionettes prompted a translation of Aristophanes’ The Birds in 1889 (with music for flute and harp by Chausson) and several more or less original plays — Le Mystères d’Eleusis, Tobie, légende biblique in 1889 (music by Casimir Baille), and Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité in 1890 (music by Paul Vidal). For La Légende de Sainte Cécile, Chausson, though less than enthusiastic (finding the subject “enormously tedious…I smell a fiasco…”), was tapped once more and began to compose the incidental music at Civray on July 10, 1891, completing the score by September 28.
The collaboration went far less smoothly than before and strained the friendship of these two highly strung artists as Boucher failed to keep in touch with the theater personnel, or with Chausson, but demanded changes as the piece went into rehearsal. Three sopranos were tried out as poet and composer quarreled over individual numbers. The chorus was poor, the sets mediocre, and the costumes ugly. Scored for small orchestra — with, as in the Tempête music, a prominent part for celesta — of the 15 numbers, most are melodramas. There is a canticle for Cecilia in praise of the Virgin, and several angelic choruses. Chausson’s biographer Jean Gallois praised the music’s “magnificent tone of celestial purity and intense mysticism,” though one may also find the bulk of the score muted and self-effacing. The premiere, on January 30, 1892, garnered equally divided reviews.