Amédée-Ernest Chausson (20 January 1855 – 10 June 1899) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 romantic

Romantic music

Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 who died just as his career was beginning to flourish.

Life

Ernest Chausson was born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 into a prosperous bourgeois

Bourgeoisie

In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

 family. His father made his fortune assisting Baron Haussmann

Baron Haussmann

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, commonly known as Baron Haussmann , was a French civic planner whose name is associated with the rebuilding of Paris...

 in the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s.

To please his father, Chausson studied law and was appointed a barrister for the Court of Appeals; but in truth, he had little or no interest in the law. He frequented the Paris salons

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

, where he met celebrities such as Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.-Biography:...

, Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon

Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...

, and Vincent d'Indy

Vincent d'Indy

Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...

. Before definitively deciding on his career, he dabbled in writing and drawing.

In October 1879, at the age of 25, he began attending the composition classes of the opera composer Jules Massenet

Jules Massenet

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...

 at the Paris Conservatoire

Conservatoire de Paris

The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...

. Chausson had already composed some piano pieces and songs. Nevertheless, the earliest manuscripts that have been preserved are those corrected by Massenet.

During 1882 and 1883, Chausson, who enjoyed travel, visited Bayreuth

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

The or Bayreuth Festival Theatre is an opera house north of Bayreuth, Germany, dedicated solely to the performance of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner...

 to hear the operas of Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

. On the first of these journeys, Chausson went with d'Indy for the premiere of Wagner's Parsifal

Parsifal

Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...

, and on the second trip he went with his new spouse Jeanne Escudier, whose sister Madeleine was married to art collector Henry Lerolle

Henry Lerolle

Henry Lerolle was a French painter, art collector and patron, born in Paris. He studied at Académie Suisse and in the studio of Louis Lamothe....

.
From 1886 until his death in 1899, Chausson was secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique

Société Nationale de Musique

The Société Nationale de Musique was founded on February 25, 1871 to promote French music and to allow young composers to present their music in public...

. In his own home (22 Boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc Monceau

Parc Monceau

Parc Monceau is a semi-public park situated in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France, at the junction of Boulevard de Courcelles, Rue de Prony and Rue Georges Berger. At the main entrance is a rotunda. The park covers an area of 8.2 hectares ....

), he received a great many eminent artists, including the composers Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers...

, Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

, and Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish Catalan pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms .-Life:Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz...

, the poet Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

, the Russian novelist Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

, and the impressionist painter Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

. Chausson also assembled an important collection of paintings.

When only 44 years old, Chausson died in Limay, Yvelines

Limay, Yvelines

Limay is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris from the center.Limay lies across the Seine river from Mantes-la-Jolie.-People:...

, as a result of a freak accident. While the whole affair remains somewhat mysterious, it appears that he lost control of the bicycle he was riding on a downhill slope, ran straight into a brick wall, and perished instantly. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the...

 in Paris. A small park called Place Ernest-Chausson in the 17th arrondissement of Paris is named in his honor.

Music

The creative work of Chausson is commonly divided into three periods. In the first, which was dominated by Massenet, the composer exhibits primarily fluid and elegant melodies. The second period, dating from 1886, is marked by a more dramatic character, deriving partly from Chausson's contacts with the artistic milieux in which he moved. From his father's death in 1894 dates the beginning of his third period, during which he was especially influenced by his reading of the symbolist poets and Russian literature, particularly Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

.

Chausson's work is deeply individual, but it does reflect some technical influences of both Wagner and his other musical hero César Franck

César Franck

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....

. Stylistic traces of Massenet and even Brahms

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...

 can be detected sometimes. In general, Chausson's compositional idiom bridges the gap between the ripe Romanticism of Massenet and Franck and the more introverted Impressionism of Debussy.

Several delicate and admirable songs came from Chausson's pen. He completed one opera, Le Roi Arthus

Le roi Arthus

Le roi Arthus is an opera in three acts by the French composer Ernest Chausson to his own libretto. It was composed between 1886 and 1895, but only first performed on 30 November 1903 at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, after long delays...

(King Arthur). His orchestral output was small, but significant. It includes the Symphony in B flat, his sole symphony, Poème for Violin and Orchestra, an important piece in the violin repertoire; and the dramatic, and haunting, song-cycle Poème de l'amour et de la mer

Poème de l'amour et de la mer

The Poème de l'amour et de la mer , op. 19, is a song cycle for voice and orchestra by Ernest Chausson. It was composed over an extended period between 1882 and 1892 and dedicated to Henri Duparc...

.

Chausson is believed to be the first composer to use the celesta

Celesta

The celesta or celeste is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano or of a large wooden music box . The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal plates suspended over wooden resonators...

. He employed that instrument in December 1888 in his incidental music

Incidental music

Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, film or some other form not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as the "film score" or "soundtrack"....

, written for a small orchestra, for La tempête, a French translation by Maurice Bouchor

Maurice Bouchor

Maurice Bouchor was a French poet and sculptor.He was born in Paris. He published in succession Chansons joyeuses , Poèmes de l'amour et de la mer , Le Faust moderne in prose and verse, and Les Contes parisiens in verse...

 of Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

's The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

.

Not at all prolific, Chausson left behind only 39 opus-numbered pieces. (See List of compositions by Ernest Chausson.) Musical creation for him always proved to be a long, painful struggle. However, the quality and originality of his compositions are consistently high, and they continue to make occasional appearances on programs of leading singers, chamber music ensembles and orchestras.

External links

• Hymne védique Chorus accompanied by orchestra, op. 9 Vocal Score (Paris: Hamelle, 1886) From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
• Mélodies pour chant et piano, op. 2 (Paris: J. Hamelle, 1890) From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
• Les Vêpres du Commun des saint, op. 31 (Paris: Editions de la Schola Cantorum, 1907) From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
• Recording of Piano Trio in G minor Op. 3