Throughout 1868, the twenty-year-old Henri Duparc worked intensely over a tiny handful of compositions which he would see published the following year—a set of Schumannesque piano pieces, Feuilles volantes, his official Opus 1, and a curiously heterogeneous collection of five mélodies. Of the latter, only Soupir and Chanson triste would survive his fastidiously compulsive winnowing. But the discarded numbers suggest, by contrast, the path along which his taste was developing. Le galop, for instance—like his duet, La fuite (1871)—is a romance of the sort practiced by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Lalo, and a host of others, working over dashing, colorful, exotic, and picturesque evocations of free-spirited romps in Nature's bosom. It should be noted that the romances by these composers would seem suddenly naïve and pass into the bourne of the passé with the slow emergence of Duparc's mélodies over the next sixteen years, not to mention the miraculous unfolding of Fauré's genius. The Sérénade, to words by one Gabriel Marc, on the other hand, probably seemed to Duparc too close to the easy sentiments of salon fare, while his setting of a feeble adaptation of Goethe's poem "Mignon" ("Kennst du das Land . . .") by Victor Wilder—the Romance de Mignon—is singularly lacking in invention or involvement. But Soupir and Chanson triste usher us for the first time into a veiled, mysterious, twilit demesne, in which their poems' stereotypical conceits are amplified with a visionary, passionate, Wagnerian resonance. This lyric is by Jean Lahor, pseudonym of Dr. Henri Cazalis. Chanson triste was, according to the composer, his first song-thus, an astounding coup. Duparc prepared an orchestral version in 1912.

Over a wave-like arpeggio lending movement to the slowly arching harmonic trajectory, the voice—avec un sentiment tendre et intime—coos très doux a magical, gently skipping evocation of summer moonlight radiating from the beloved's heart, an aura in which care vanishes, charmed by caresses and the recitation of "a ballad which will seem to tell of us." Sinuous modulations sketch a barely suppressed oscillation between yearning and rapture before fantasy triumphs in a sublime benediction with the return to C:



And in your eyes full of sadness

In your eyes then I shall drink

So many kisses and tendernesses

That perhaps I shall be cured . . .

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