When Chausson completed his grand opera Le Roi Arthus in 1895, he was a rather different artist than the Wagner-enthralled composer who had begun it nearly a decade before. Hearing Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880 had been a major event that Chausson spent the remainder of the '80s assimilating, as his fascination with the Liebestod—which he shared with Chabrier—worked itself out in the Poème de l'amour et de la mer. Following Wagner's lead by choosing, in Le Roi Arthus, a legendary subject woven around adulterous lovers opened a tortuous path. It hardly mattered that, as the title implied, King Arthur was the central figure and hero of the piece, that the obligatory love duet for Lancelot and Guinivere had been disposed of in the first act, that the composer's libretto was a finer piece of work than anything Wagner ever penned (if less drunkenly archetypal), or that the music was some of Chausson's grandest and most personal, the inevitable comparisons with Tristan und Isolde were made—not least, by Chausson himself. Prone to self-doubt and perpetually dissatisfied with what, to anyone else (for instance, his young friend Debussy), loomed as palpable achievement, by the time his reservations threatened to become crippling, Chausson had invested too much of himself in Arthus to turn back, though the way forward became increasingly grueling. In common with Arthus and the Poème de l'amour et de la mer, the symphony, which brought the decade to a close, possesses an often overloaded sumptuous earnestness which, in the decade of the 1890s, Chausson would leave behind. Meanwhile, with the completion of Arthus the dreary tale of Chausson's attempts to have it produced begins. No French opera house would take it, nor would the Spanish, the Belgians, the Germans, or the Prague Opera. At last, he shelved it, regretting, rather like his own Arthur, that he'd ever attempted it. (The Belgians did take it, after all—Le Roi Arthus was produced at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 1903, when the composer had been dead four years.) But those were practical considerations—with Arthus done, Chausson consciously sought to "de-Wagnerise" his music and his utterance takes on a new clarity as the persistent manic/depressive strain is, if not muted, ameliorated by a new urbanity. Composed at Veyrier in August 1897, the Pièce for cello and piano—playing about seven minutes—is suffused with a lingering sweetness made richer by its melancholy undertow.

© 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.