Scholarship has not yet caught up with Chabrier. Of the Cinq Pièces posthumes published by Enoch in 1897—three years after the composer's death—little is known. For instance, the first piece, Aubade, is often confidently assigned to the year 1883, though one writer who claims to have seen the manuscript, at the Opéra Comique's Chabrier Exposition in 1941, reports that it is dated February 1881. All agree that it is dedicated to the pianist, Marie Jaëll (1846 - 1925), a member of Liszt's circle during his declining years. It is not even known if Aubade is Chabrier's title. The titles of the remaining works seem to have been supplied by the publisher, a more common practice than is now generally realized, also visited upon composers very much alive. But such details matter less with Chabrier for, from the period of his becoming a young man in the Paris of the early 1860s, his works, however much they might owe to the salon or to the comedic zaniness of Hervé and Offenbach, are distinctive and, the best of them, sui generis.

Aubade, for instance, opens with a blithe fanfare—a wake-up call—whose rhythmic insistence soon carries a number of winning melodic embellishments. Gracious. Airy. Lit by sunburst. And couched in a highly original pianistic idiom. Ballibile is an all-too-brief ballet number whose playful zest reveals Chabrier as "the angel of drollery." The ill-named Caprice, on the other hand, seems misplaced, an experimental piece. A declamatory, falling, unaccompanied melody—a sort of impassioned recitative which was disparaged by Cortot as a carillon—carries into a Tristanesquely impassioned arioso dissolving above a curiously inarticulate bass tremolo. Though complete in the sense that it possesses a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, the Caprice is unfinished—even unrealized—and one senses why Chabrier withheld it from publication while relishing a rare glimpse into the aural atelier of this most fastidious of composers. The very tender Feuillet d'album is the worldly love song of a refined sensualist, wistfully charming as it skirts passion in a ravishing but conventionally dovetailed melody. Finally, the Ronde Champêtre is less a rustic gambol than a music hall turn, its first lurching strain taken from the "Air de Poussah" from the unpublished comic opera Fisch-Ton-Kan, written in collaboration with Paul Verlaine and privately produced in 1873. The aria begins "J'engraisse/Mon front brille d'allégresse" (I'm putting on weight/My brow glows with joy). This bizarre reminiscence is soon relieved by music of delicate enchantment, then by brindisi-like convivial verve in which this astoundingly complex character, Chabrier, appears and disappears in the Pan-like guise of the jolly fat man. Ballibile, Feuillet d'album, and Ronde Champêtre received their first performances at the hands of Édouard Risler (1837 - 1929) in a concert of the Societé Nationale de Musique, on April 3, 1897.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.