As the end of the nineteenth century loomed, Vincent d'Indy was well established and highly visible as one of France's leading progressive composers, not yet having been eclipsed by Debussy or cast as a rabid reactionary by Ravel's generation. His dramatic legend, Le Chant de la cloche, had taken the City of Paris prize in 1885, and the evergreen Symphony on a French Mountain Air was completed the following year. Laid out along Wagnerian lines, his opera (or "action musicale") Fervaal, produced at the Brussels Théâtre de la Monnaie in 1897, wore the aura of a "French Parsifal." Not least, as director of the recently founded Schola Cantorum—for which he wrote the course—d'Indy was a highly influential presence in French musical life.

It was inevitable, therefore, that he should have been asked for a piece to grace the concerts of Paul Taffanel's Societé des instruments à vent, which he answered in 1898 with the Chansons et Danses, scored for flute, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, and horn. Moreover, he and Taffanel shared a passion for the operas of the master of Bayreuth, and often participated—with such distinguished musicians as Fauré, Messager, and the pianist Raoul Pugno—in private concerts of Wagner's music.

That may, in some measure, explain why the Chanson is permeated, rather too frankly, with reminiscences of the Siegfried Idyll, both in its opening long-breathed andante melody—wavering between major and minor—and the halting gestures which beset the more suavely animated second theme. Muted, fragments of both themes lead to an elegiac close.

The Danses take the form of a simple rondo; an insistently attractive folk melody, chirping over a percolating accompaniment, is heard three times, each time more brilliantly, interwoven with serenely blithesome episodes, and rounded off, in good cyclic fashion, with a recall of the Chanson.

The Societé des instruments à vent gave the premiere on March 7, 1899. Although it is only perhaps a minor masterpiece within the composer's output, the Chanson et Danses nevertheless contains some of d'Indy's most happily relaxed invention, rife with his characteristic angular charm.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide