The Gallic Muse

Fülszöveg

The Gallic Muse
BY LAURENCE DA VIES
Six French composers of the past century—Faúré, Duparc, Debussy, Satie, Ravel and Poulenc—are the subjects of a series of interrelated essays concerning the music they wrote and their contributions to a long-standing and continuing tradition in French music. Partly biographical and partly critical in intent, these profiles show not only the musical and personal impact of each composer upon the other but how all responded independently to a common cultural disposition.
The first essay, "Gabriel Faúré, Orpheus of French Song," concerns itself with that composer's prodigious musical output, his eminence as a teacher extraordinaire and his role as a harbinger of the age of Stravinsky.
Subtitled "An Aesthetic Tragedy," the piece on Henri Duparc shows him as "one of those artists whose talents are burnt out in rapid fashion, and to whom the act of composition is as agonized as it is short-lived." Yet though Duparc's achievements look... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Gallic Muse
BY LAURENCE DA VIES
Six French composers of the past century—Faúré, Duparc, Debussy, Satie, Ravel and Poulenc—are the subjects of a series of interrelated essays concerning the music they wrote and their contributions to a long-standing and continuing tradition in French music. Partly biographical and partly critical in intent, these profiles show not only the musical and personal impact of each composer upon the other but how all responded independently to a common cultural disposition.
The first essay, "Gabriel Faúré, Orpheus of French Song," concerns itself with that composer's prodigious musical output, his eminence as a teacher extraordinaire and his role as a harbinger of the age of Stravinsky.
Subtitled "An Aesthetic Tragedy," the piece on Henri Duparc shows him as "one of those artists whose talents are burnt out in rapid fashion, and to whom the act of composition is as agonized as it is short-lived." Yet though Duparc's achievements look discouragingly slight alongside those of Faúré and Debussy, he brought a nobility and capaciousness to the art song which it has neither
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aspired to nor exceeded since his day.
In "Claude Debussy, Hedonist and Voluptuary," a paradoxical portrait emerges of an extravagant, whimsical, temperamental personality.
Innovator, exhibitionist and musical iconoclast, Erik Satie was long considered one of the supreme charlatans of art. Although he was not a great composer, he was one who dared the impossible and to a large extent succeeded, who had the vision and courage to dispense with the conventional trappings of the musical art and write only the barest essentials.
Maurice Ravel is presented as a genius of craftsmanship, a fanatically fastidious composer obsessed with technical V' exactness in music. Dr. Davies analyzes y some of Ravel's unprecedentedly diffi- i I cult keyboard works and devotes some ^ attention to the influence of the cinema on Ravel's aesthetic. j
The final essay, "Francis Poulenc, i
Jongleur de Notre Dame," introduces us to a composer who projected more of his own personality into his work than any other. We see both the man and the artist as a vulgarian possessed of exquisite sensibilities, as both innocent and cosmopolite, practical joker and man of the spirit.
A. S. Barnes and Company South Brunswick and New York Vissza