“If it’s true, Chloris ...
... that you love me, how unwelcome death would be - even if it were to replace my happiness with the bliss of heaven."
These words by the Renaissance author Théophile de Viau must at the time have sounded like a challenge to the existing order. Valuing one's fortunes in the here and now above those of the eternal soul in the hereafter? Surely a blasphemous notion for a Church challenged by the dawn of a new consciousness, and fighting hard to maintain its grip on Western man's paradigm.
Four centuries later, this revolutionary idea was turned into (or perhaps, you might think, scaled down to the level of) languid, hauntingly melancholic musings by the composer Reynaldo Hahn.
Hahn, a Frenchman with Venezuelan roots and one of the most gifted musicians of his era, was no modernist like Ravel, nor a destroyer of musical certainties like Eric Satie. He remained a defender of trusted structures and an advocate of elegance and melodic beauty. This shy and somewhat troubled man became a master of the Kunstlied, the art song. This genre above all others allowed him endlessly to indulge in introspection, and to trace the minutest details of what he saw.
In this regard, Hahn resembles the great Novelist Marcel Proust, and it is perhaps no concidence that these two men were drawn to each other and, in fact, became lovers. "Everything I've done has been thanks to Reynaldo", Proust said, and though we might respectfully doubt that, there can be no doubt of the emotional bond between these two great artists.
Here, then, is Reynaldo Hahn's beautiful setting of de Vieau's poem À Chloris, sung by the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. He is accompanied by Jérôme Ducros. This is from their disc Opium: Mélodies françaises (1998, Erato / Virgin Classics 5099921662).
