Koechlin came to music late. After studies at the École Poytechnique, cut short by tuberculosis and an extended convalescence in Algiers in 1889, he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890, at the age of 22, for a dilatory seven year course of study. Scion of a wealthy family, he could afford to take his time. His teachers included Bourgault-Ducoudray for history, Massenet for composition, and Gédalge for fugue. The latter was perhaps the most influential—in terms of what can be taught—spurring an already avid interest in Bach that would issue at the end of Koechlin's long life in that grand contrapuntal monument, the Offrande musicale sur le nom de BACH (1942). Following Gédalge, Koechlin would himself, in later years, write treatises on harmony and fugue that possess the considerable interest of spanning the late Romantic and early Modern eras from the vantage of a fiercely independent creative spirit who was also one of the most original harmonists and adventurous contrapuntists of his age. After his Conservatoire years, Koechlin continued to study privately with Fauré, whose characteristic sound pointed the way to the discovery of his own. Always industrious and a quick learner, Koechlin's chief difficulty through the 1890s seems to have been separating traditional technique from those oddments of it that he could use—unlearning as much as learning. A number of highly finished, deliciously expressive songs from this period show that Koechlin, in terms of craft, was already a minor master. The relative popularity of the songs Le Thé (1890) and Si tu le veux (1894), or Au loin—the second of Deux pièces symphoniques composed in 1896 and orchestrated between that year and 1900—owes to their reliance on traditional technique, looming from an era before Koechlin hit his stride, which is almost certainly why he later judged Au loin and its companion, En rêve, with surprising harshness as "soaked in an atmosphere à la Turner with blurred contours. As a result nothing progresses; it is a dream world, too static, and rather like Duparc's Extase minus its beauty!" Originally laid out for cor anglais and piano, the long-spun elegiac cor anglais melody looks forward to Koechlin's monodic procedures while retaining a sufficient geste of conventional melos to be immediately intelligible and appealing. The piano-accompanied version was performed at a Matinée Engel concert on April 7, 1897; the twice-longer orchestral version on February 23, 1908, at the Concerts Symphoniques d'Angers, led by Koechlin.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide