Reynaldo Hahn
"Little
Reynaldo Hahn sat down at the piano", wrote Edmond de
Goncourt in the last volume of his celebrated Journal,
"and played music that he had composed himself for three or
four of Verlaine's pieces. They are real poetic gems, a literary
music in the mould of Rollinat, but more delicate, more
distinguished, more masterful than that of the poet from
Berrichon."
Goncourt wrote these words after leaving a
dinner party at the home of Alphonse Daudet, Alphonse Daudet who
called Reynaldo Hahn "his dear musician of preference"
and who asked this young man, then still almost a child, to write
the stage music for L'Obstacle. This was Reynaldo Hahn's
theatrical debut, and also the start of the great admiration that
all the most refined artists of our era have always felt for his
music. We are all familiar with the beautiful study that Stephane
Mallarmé dedicated to him, the lines that Pierre Loti dedicated
to him, as well as the couplet by Mallarmé in which
"Reynaldo" is rhymed with "jet d'eau",
and Anatole France's predilection for his works. But is not
Reynaldo Hahn also a writer of real merit? Édouard Risler
considered his musical criticism the equal of Berlioz and Reyer,
and when Catulle Mendèz, Wagner's commentator and friend, died,
were not all voices raised in unison to declare Reynaldo Hahn his
successor as critic in Journal, which he presently
exercises with infinite taste, authority and brilliance.
If Reynaldo Hahn excites great admiration among
artists, perhaps he has met with greater resistance from that
class which is so useful, so powerful, but rather more fervent
than forward-looking, and which has taken on considerable
importance and proportion these days, which styles itself
"amateurs", but which we may not be too severe by
describing as "snobs".
The truth is that, in any given period,
so-called "advanced" amateurs have never been able to
conceive of avant-garde Art other than in the context of
accomplishments brought to the fore by the most recent revolution
in technique. To take an example from outside the sphere of
music, all the "advanced" amateurs of Ingres' day
sincerely believed that Ingres was a "conventionalist"
and "old fashioned" and much preferred the mediocre
students of Delacroix, who they imagined to be more
"advanced" because they followed the mannerisms then in
fashion. If one speaks to M. Degas today, who is probably just as
"advanced" as the said amateurs, about the poor
students of Delacroix, he will shrug his shoulders, whereas he
proclaims Ingres one of the greatest painters of all time. I do
not mean to say that a great artist, just because he appears to
stand in reaction to current convention, is thereby greater
because of that. But it is wrong to think that he is necessarily less
great. Stendhal, at the height of Romanticism, said that he took
his style from the civil statute book, and scoffed at romantic
lyricism. Today we place him just as high as the great romantics.
Thus we can demonstrate to them that an apparent affectation of
reaction against certain modern formulae, as in the case of
Reynaldo Hahn, can prevail. In reality, no true musician is
deceived by it.
Reynaldo Hahn began to compose at a very early
age. After the music for L'Obstacle which we mentioned
earlier, his real theatrical debut was L'Ile de rêve at
the Opéra-Comique. This was in a period of lyrical effusion,
poetry and charm, marked by the great success of his Chansons
grises. Without doubt his style was becoming tougher, deeper
and more objectivized. But even when a work has become more
powerful, who can prevent themselves from occasionally looking
back with regret at the simpler productions from early youth
which still retain the perfume of flowers so quickly wilted and
that we will never find again? Certainly Le Lys rouge is
a superior book to Livre de mon ami, La Légende des
siècles to Feuilles d'automne, Les
Éblouissements to Coeur innombrable; but do we not
come back to them sometimes to seek from them a more naive
spontaneity, an inimitable tone, the irretrievable sweetness of
a first promise or a first confession?
But everything links together in the life of an
artist, following the implacable logic of his interior evolution.
Already in Reynaldo Hahn is the tendency to renounce all the
graces and "fluencies" that he sacrifices, like
charming and chosen victims, on the altar of a more severe
Divinity: Truth. Not Realism, that parody of truth in which
"neo-Italianism" manages to suppress any true, profound
reality, but an inner, psychological truth. His music is not the
song described by Victor Hugo "in which no humanity
remains". It is nothing less than the very life of the soul,
the internal substance of language, liberated, risen up, taken
wing and become music. It is by dint of his respect for words
than he surpasses them, it is through his submission to them that
he bends them to a higher truth than any they contain in germ,
but out of which music alone can unfold "virtualities".
It is through contact with the very text that he takes the
strength to raise himself above them, like aviators who run along
the ground before taking to their wings, so as to take to the air
both higher and more effectively. While the Muses of Sweetness
and Truth guide Reynaldo Hahn through his melodic work by the
most difficult and the most beautiful paths, while he succeeds in
producing, in the words of Verlaine,
All that which comprises
The human word of grace and love,
his dramatic work follows the same evolution.