La vie antérieure was the last and finest of Duparc's exquisite handful of mélodies, completed in 1884, before a mysterious, progressive nervous affliction rendered composition impossible. And while he continued to revise his mélodies and orchestrate some of them—the orchestration of Chanson triste was made as late as 1912—his bent took a destructive turn. In a letter, written in 1920 to his publisher, Alexis Rouart, Duparc recalled coming upon the score of his opera, Roussalka, "lying asleep in a drawer, and feeling that my sight was going and that I should never be able to finish it, I had a fire lit in June and I burnt the whole of it, thinking that would console me. It made no difference, and three or four months later, I rewrote all that I remembered...." That, too, was eventually consigned to the flames, though, he told Rouart, some of its material was used in the second half of La Vie antérieure. Au pays où se fait guerre also originated as a scene for Roussalka. How many of the other mélodies did this chimerical score inform?

Composed originally for voice and orchestra, in its superbly colored grandeur La vie antérieure illuminates Baudelaire's poem with oracular magnificence (which that avid Wagnerian might well have relished) as it subsumes the dark undercurrents which stirred Duparc's imagination and animated his other mélodies— the fantastic and visionary, touched with a soupçon of bizarrerie (deeply akin to the art of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau), and tinctured with infinite sadness. Over a tonic pedal in the bass, long-drawn octaves on the dominant, against which persistent voices move sinuously in contrary motion, recall Baudelaire's haunting description of a strange, opulent scene of "a former life" immediately before us.

The throbbing moment of recognition is met with an ecstatic cry —"It is there, it is there that I lived in calm delights..."—subsiding into an entranced monotone marked comme en une vision.

The climactic moment shifts suddenly into the funereal minor to cushion "The painful secret which made me languish." A mournful postlude, slowly fading out, ends with a recall of the glowing opening, now somber and fatigued.















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