EMERGING VOICES: Music Rooms - The Salon and Its Influence
This is the third in a series of posts I’ve written as part of the Emerging Voices project which is happening at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society the next two weeks. Specially, it is in relation to the Salon Concert I. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/
During the years of the Belle Époque in Paris, artmaking wasn’t happening in any royal court – it was happening in people’s living rooms. Paris’s patrons of the arts and artists alike, such as the heiress and royal-by-marriage Winnaretta Singer, the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the soprano Emma Bardac, hosted salon gatherings in their homes, where the greatest molders of French art would mingle, share their work, and exchange ideas.
Music was a focal point of these salons – it was not just background fare to add atmosphere to parties. For both audience members and performers, these were serious concerts that held just as much import in the Paris season’s calendar as anything at the Opéra, the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, or other public performance venues.
At the time, it was not considered acceptable for women to organize public concerts, but wealthy women such as Singer interested in the promotion of music got around this societal restriction by hosting these private extravaganzas at home. In doing so, they became tastemakers and exerted their influence on the public sphere. The greatest composers and performers of the day clamored for opportunities to showcase their work at these salons, as it was an important way to have one’s work discussed seriously and an important aspect of building one’s professional reputation. These salon performances were frequently reviewed by the press and were, in many ways, a gateway to commissions and performing opportunities at larger public performance venues.
As both a listener and a performer, I’ve found the experience of art song in a salon setting to be revelatory. While the concert hall has its own majesty and magic, experiencing song in these more intimate and less “formal” environs has an intensifying effect. As a performer, the communication feels more direct and personal. As an audience member, I find my ears are more curious and open to a wider array of tonalities and sounds. In both cases, I look forward to discussing the music over a glass of wine once the performance portion of the evening has ended.
During the Belle Époque, artists of many countries were flocking to Paris, and were influenced by the artistic innovation that was happening in the City of Light. In 1907, Ralph Vaughan Williams came to Paris to study with Maurice Ravel. Shortly after his return to England, he composed The Sky Above the Roof, an English translation of Paul Verlaine’s poem “Le ciel est, par‑dessus le toit.” The song is Vaughan Williams’ only setting of a translated text.
In 1910, a young Igor Stravinsky arrived in Paris, where the course of his life and art would change forever. He became famous overnight after Serge Diaghilev brought the composer’s Firebird to Paris under the auspices of the Ballets Russes. Sojourning in the south of France with his family following his successful Paris debut, Stravinsky composed his first vocal pieces in a language other than Russian, his Deux poèmes de Paul Verlaine.
Both composers were notable examples of a trend that was occurring throughout Europe: incorporating folk elements into their music. Vaughan Williams wove the folk tunes he would collect throughout the English countryside into his compositions. Stravinsky would use the idiosyncratic rhythms of the Russian language to influence his music and would base his larger-scale pieces such as the ballets Petrushka and Les Noces and the operas Mavra and Renard on Russian folk tales and songs. In these and other works, Stravinsky’s distinctively Russian elements influenced the trajectory of modern music.
Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados were also composers who wove folk elements into their music. Both were pupils of the Spanish nationalist composer, Felip Pedrell, who encouraged his students to incorporate Spanish folk music into their compositions. Falla’s Siete canciones populares, a diverse collection of songs from various regions of Spain, is perhaps one of his most frequently performed works. Granados’ Elegia eternais a setting of the Catalan poet Apeles Mestres. The song is one of many by Granados to showcase the distinct musical traditions of his native Catalonia. Although not as well-known than his peers, Fernando Obradors is primarily remembered for his copious volumes of Spanish song arrangements.
The change-filled years of the Belle Époque marked progress for many groups, most notably for women. In Paris, women were allowed to enter the Prix du Rome competition for the first time in 1903. Trailblazing women such as the Boulanger sisters began to be taken seriously as professional composers. The sole woman in the clique of French composers who became known as Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre came to prominence in the years just after World War I. Her Six chansons françaises, all composed in the neo-classical, modern French tradition forged by Gabriel Fauré, span nearly 300 years of French poetry. The songs, often through a veil of irony, explore the challenges that the confines of marriage can pose to women.
The final segment of this first salon program begins to explore the years of World War I. Charles Ives’ response to the war was reflected musically in his Three Songs of the War. His settings of poems by himself and the Canadian soldier-poet, John McCrae (author of “He Is There!” and the seminal World War I poem “In Flanders Fields”), weave elements of American patriotic songs together, at times in an almost cacophonous collage of music that is distinctly Ives-ian. The final song in the cycle, “Tom Sails Away,” is a setting of Ives’ own text, which tells the story of a brother who watches his sibling sail off to war, likely never to return.
Such was the fate of many composers who fought in the war. Both Denis Browne and George Butterworth were among the many extremely promising British composers whose lives and voices were tragically cut short fighting in World War I. Browne died at Gallipoli in 1915, while Butterworth was killed by a sniper in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.