Music and Magic from France

Music in the service of depicting magic at work -- it's been one of the great preoccupations of composers throughout the history of European music from the birth of opera in the early 1600s right to the present day.  Even such apparently staid and un-pictorial composers as Brahms had a go at it.  Sometimes magic is depicted as happening at quicksilver speed (think Mendelssohn in A Midsummer Night's Dream).  In the particular cases I want to consider today, the power of magic is quiet, immense, gentle and awe-inspiring all at once.

I've always found it curious that more composers weren't inspired by the vast trove of legends accumulating around King Arthur.  These stories have always seemed to me to be made to order for operatic or symphonic treatment, with their wealth of dramatic incident and their vividly colourful characters and settings.  Well, Wagner dipped into the edges with the operas Lohengrin and Parsifal, both of which draw on the legends of the Holy Grail that figure so prominently in the tales of Arthur and his knights.  Other examples, though, have been few and far between and mostly have remained relatively unknown.

What would a Wagnerian Arthur have sounded like?  Well, we can get a bit of a taste by listening to Ernest Chausson's opera Le roi Arthus, his last completed work.  No, it's not pure Wagner by any means, but if you combine the twin influences of Wagner and Cesar Franck with a French environment in the late 19th century, you've pretty much described the musical style in which Chausson was working.  From Wagner, he derived first the idea of creating his own libretto, and it is full of the positive spirit of the man who wrote it.  Even though it is framed as a tragedy, the tragic downfall of the man Arthur happens even as his great ideal promises its own future redemption.

Like Wagner, Chausson also composed in lengthy scenes, six in all for an opera lasting a little under 3 hours.  There are no detachable set pieces, arias, etc.  The continuous flow of the music shows how much he learned from the master of Bayreuth, even though he makes but slight use of leitmotifs.  There is a lyrical quality to the score, not at all Wagnerian, but definitely in line with other French composers of the late 19th century.  All in all, a joy to the ear.

Now, what about the magic?  Well, there's plenty of that in the Arthurian legendarium; which moments would Chausson choose to include?  There are two main scenes of magic.  In Act II the distraught Arthur cries out to Merlin to help him, and Merlin appears upstage, imprisoned by magic in the apple grove, to foretell, in dark bass tones, Arthur's death.  The music here is spare, lightly scored, with muted strings and occasional quiet phrases from the winds. 

At the end, Arthur is left alone after the death of Lancelot, with his entire world in ruins.  As he pleads for God to end his life, a mysterious, mystical sequence of common chords is heard from an offstage chorus, ushering in the final scene where Arthur is taken away in a magical boat to be healed of his wounds and to sleep in peace until the future time when is to return.  Those beautiful common chords have an interesting history -- fittingly enough, one where the present circles around to join hands with the past.

Chausson's Op. 5 is a masterly symphonic poem entitled Viviane, the name of the fairy/witch who tricks Merlin into surrendering his magical powers and then imprisons him in the tree.  These events are clearly depicted in the music, which opens with that same beautiful sequence of common chords, scored lightly for strings.

There's no question that this magical sound deserves a place in his magnum opus.  By placing it in the mouths of the mystic celestial singers at the end of Arthus, Chausson retroactively conferred on this potent musical idea a stature of the divine, or of good or "white" magic if you prefer.  In the opera, the chorus continues singing in the background throughout Arthur's magnificent concluding arioso, and finally leads the way as his body at last appears in the magical boat, sailing into the distance.

It seems to me little short of scandalous that Le Roi Arthus has only been recorded in full (as far as I can find out) two times.  The older recording from 1987 is the one I have, on three Erato CDs, and is conducted with great passion and fire by Armin Jordan. The three leads are all first-rate: Teresa Zylis-Gara as Genievre (Guinevere), Gosta Winbergh as Lancelot, and Canadian baritone Gino Quilico as Arthus. 

Like most of Chausson's output, Viviane has not fared much better in frequency.  My recording is a re-release of an EMI France CD conducted by Michel Plasson with the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and comes together with the Symphony in B flat and another symphonic poem, Soir de fete.  All these works are well worth having, especially in you like Cesar Franck's lone symphony and wish he had written more of them!