Steam-powered locomotives running on steel tracks had been tried out in England in the early 1800s and by 1825, were sufficiently reliable to provide freight and passenger services. By 1839, a railway—or chemin de fer—joined Paris and Versailles. When Berlioz, ruined by the failure of La Damnation de Faust in 1846, embarked for St. Petersburg the following year to recoup his losses, the trip from Paris required 14 days by coach and sled. By the time of his return visit 20 years later, railway connections carried him to St. Petersburg in just five days, including a three-day layover in Berlin. Speed and the new strictness of standard-scheduled-time had become components of everyday life. Artists provided a mixed chorus; while Wordsworth deplored the intrusion of monstrous machinery into bucolic settings, Vigny praised the new world of adventure made possible by railway travel, and Lamartine looked forward to an era of brotherhood transcending frontiers. Alkan responded with satirical exuberance. Having just emerged from his first long period of seclusion to give a well-received concert on April 29, 1844, he had seen his briskly crisp Saltarelle, introduced there, provoke a sensation soon to be replicated by other pianists. On this wave of notoriety, he visited the salons, privately playing his latest pieces before distinguished, influential audiences. Among these were the Marche funèbre and Marche triomphale, the grandiose concert étude Le preux, and a coruscating toccata in Le chemin de fer. While parody is a common staple in music, satire is not, and the listener is likely to be so wowed by Alkan's descriptive effects in Le chemin de fer—grinding wheels, bells, whistles, the excitement of headlong hurtling mass—that he/she misses their incisively manic, campily comic zaniness. For Alkan was, indeed, a sophisticate of exquisite if often disconcertingly eldritch taste, and his piece is less a nineteenth century counterpart of Honegger's Pacific 231 than a sendup akin to Flaubert's entry under "Railways" in The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas "Talk about them ecstatically, saying, 'I, my dear sir, who am speaking to you now-this morning I was at X; I had taken the train, I transacted my business there, and by X o'clock I was back here.'" While it plays just under five minutes, a crackling performance of Le chemin de fer brushes away the received notion of Alkan as a charming or puzzling eccentric and brings the listener face-to-face with a self-aware and imminently Modern ironist who also happens to be a Romantic master of visionary power.

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