Performers: Ludovic Tézier (voice), Chung Myung-whun (conductor), Orchestre National de Radio-France
Short biography and programme notes by Keith Anderson:
A piano pupil of César Franck as a schoolboy, Henri Duparc studied law, while continuing his musical interests with composition lessons from the same teacher. Much of the music he wrote at this time, he discarded, but in 1868 he published a set of piano pieces, Feuilles volantes, and wrote five songs, of which he kept only two, Soupir and Chanson triste, although the other three were not destroyed and were rediscovered some years after his death. Duparc’s career as a composer was a short one. In Paris he was associated with the foundation of the Société Nationale de Musique, which gave its first concert in 1871 and involved, on its committee, Saint-Saëns, Alexis de Castillon, Romaine Bussine, the violinist and composer Jules Auguste Garcin and the composer and teacher Charles Lenepveu. As secretary of the organization, Duparc had a reputation for administrative efficiency, reflected in his subsequent career in local provincial government but sorting ill with the hyperaesthesia that ended his creative career as a composer at the age of 36.
Duparc, in common with other contemporaries in France, was greatly influenced by Wagner. In Munich he had heard Das Rheingold and Tristan und Isolde, during a visit there with Vincent d’Indy in 1869, and the following years brought further visits, including, in 1879, an expedition to Bayreuth with Emmanuel Chabrier. At the same time he was at the forefront of cultural fashions of the time, an enthusiast for the literature, drama and painting of the day.
In the years that followed the end of his career as a composer, Duparc continued to interest himself in all the arts, occupying himself with painting and drawing, until the onset of blindness and in his final years complete paralysis. He died in 1933 at the age of 85.
The creative career of Duparc lasted sixteen years and his most significant contribution to music lies in his sixteen solo songs. After the last of these, written in 1884, he wrote nothing, but was able to work on orchestrations of some of the song accompaniments and on editing earlier compositions, while he was still able to see. His choice of texts for his songs suggests a mood of melancholy that ultimately seems to have triumphed in final silence.
In 1871 came the dramatic La vague et la cloche (The Wave and the Bell) 9, conceived first with an orchestral accompaniment that was first arranged for piano by Vincent d’Indy, to whom the work is dedicated, to be followed by Duparc’s own piano version of the accompaniment. The words are by François Coppée, known as the poète des humbles, from the title of one of his poems and his preoccupation with the ordinary people of Paris.
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