High above all literary men of the time towered Victor Hugo. This man, along with Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, was one of the greatest virtuosos of language the world has ever seen. Pity only that he had not the genius of the other three! To his time he seemed supreme. But since his death his reputation has been steadily declining. We have come to see how much of his work was only—language. He attained his emotional effects through emotional words rather than through emotional interpretation. He was incurably melodramatic and only his power of language saves a large share of his work from falling to the level of any yellow-back novel or the cheap theatre romance. He attempted to cover the whole of life—to interpret the criminal, the hero, and the child, as well as woman in every one of her moods and states. But through all the work, even the magnificent scenes of Les Misérables, the true human touch is somehow lacking. Everything is sacrificed to the great god Effect, to whom alone Hugo offered his most precious burnt offerings. Much of his work was in the form of short lyrics, but it is in this department that his reputation has suffered most in the half century just past. The lyric demands a naïveté which Hugo, already famous at the age of seventeen, never had. His lyric poems are always overweighted with their language, always too foreign to the spirit of the folk-poem, which is at the foundation of all lyric expression. They were, however, freely set to music, as was inevitable, and furnish a goodly share of the texts for the song literature of the time.

Lamartine in his lyric work suffered considerably from the disease of the time—over-emphasis. He ranked as a philosopher in his day—much the sort of philosopher which Maeterlinck pretends to be to-day. He had a goodly share of the didactic in his makeup, as Hugo never had (except toward the end of his life, when didacticism became the fashion). As a result we can hardly place Lamartine any higher than Hugo as a lyric poet. But his ardent religious sense, combined with his fine power over eloquent language, made him greatly loved in his day and as a result his texts enter largely into the song literature of the time. Béranger had much more of the true lyric in him. His language was simple, his message popular. He was always more at home in the streets than in the drawing room. In some ways he might be called the Kipling of his time. He appealed to the French sense of national pride, dwelling upon the glorious history of the past and the nobility of the French character with all the paraphernalia of the jingo poet. In particular he resuscitated, or rather created, the Napoleonic myth. The age in which he wrote was a new one, containing few of the immediate conditions of Napoleon’s time. A new generation had sprung up, a generation which had not experienced the heartaches and miseries of the Napoleonic wars, or else had forgotten them, and thought of the time only as the age in which France single-handed had defeated the whole of Europe. Napoleon was no longer the epileptic and egomaniac who had shattered the fine ideals of the French Revolution and for his own ambition brought France almost to the verge of ruin. He was now le petit caporal who had fought with his men on the bridge at Arcola, had eaten the same food and slept on the same hard ground with his army. The myth was tremendously attractive, and made it possible some twenty years later for a shallow adventurer to become Emperor of France (merely because he happened to be the nephew of the great Bonaparte) and bring France once more to the verge of ruin to please personal and dynastic ambition. In the creation of this myth Béranger’s sense of the picturesque and popular served him well. As a lyric poet, apart from the peculiar nature of his subject matter, he would hardly be remembered. The most genuine and most refined of the literary men of the time was Musset, for many years the lover of Georges Sand and Chopin’s successor in her affections. His work partook far less of the spectacular than that of his contemporaries. He was interested in interpreting the human soul and he did his work with the most delicate literary art. His inspiration was fresh and creative; his workmanship was finished to the last degree. It is a great pity that he had no Schubert to set his poems to music. A musician of the stature of Musset might have created a distinctive and great French song literature fifty years earlier than it came.

I

If the right composer had been at hand French song literature in the nineteenth century might have equalled the German, for the conditions seemed to be ripe. But the French musical tradition for many decades was extraordinarily emasculated, and in no department of musical activity did this show so plainly as in the songs. With a few exceptions the French songs from 1830 to 1890 show very few qualities of creative vigor. The ideal was suavity and facility. Doubtless there was beneath the smooth melodies a subtlety of suggestion that gave them a certain artistic value, but this quality is peculiarly French, and without other elements of interest the French songs could hardly attain any great international vogue. It is astonishing—the sameness of these songs which appear in volumes, with eternal repetition and rigid convention. The sentimentalism of the period dominates the whole song output. The composers were extraordinarily timid; the melodies followed the same suave line, and the harmonies were the same eternal succession. The tradition of good taste became little better than a worship of the accredited and commonplace.

The one composer who was markedly free of this fault was, of course, Hector Berlioz, one of the most powerful geniuses in all French music. There is little to connect his work with that of other French composers: in many ways he was their polar opposite. A certain love for graceful and somewhat cold melody (a quality he derived from Gluck and not from his contemporaries), a certain clinging to established forms (with very revolutionary content), and here ends the list of similarities. For the rest he carried into his vocal music the qualities which made his symphonies seem so wild and so anarchic to his countrymen. His harmonies were daring in the extreme. His vocal parts were irregular, without balanced phrases, without regular succession and contrast of similar sections, without any of the clearness of outline which is almost the sole virtue in most of his contemporaries. He modulated through any number of keys, introduced dissonance in unheard of quantity, and filled his accompaniment with rich detail to an extent which to the taste of his time was nothing short of vulgar. Throughout his work he followed his own whim where other men would have followed iron convention. But, though his songs are few in number and though they contain peculiar difficulties which have prevented their extensive use in concert programs, they have held their place in the estimation of musicians far better than any other French songs of the period. There are no waste places in these songs. Throughout it is the creative musician who is speaking. The conventional melodic phrases and harmonic sequences, when they are used, have a fine sincerity. When the music is unconventional it is stimulating and suggestive. The impression one gets is that of a vigorous, even violent, brain ceaselessly creating, willing to experiment, willing to make mistakes, but always writing what he believes to be his best. His artistic sincerity is shown by the several versions which exist of some of his songs; his richness of invention by the variants in these versions. Most of the songs are highly elaborate and dramatic. Sometimes, as often happened with Berlioz, they tend to the pretentious and pompous. They are never easy to grasp. But each and every one of them is worth a musician’s study and the student of singing in particular cannot well afford to let Berlioz remain a closed book to him.

The earlier songs, written before 1830, are in general simple and conventional. At times we feel the young man who has not yet realized his creative powers. But even these early songs have a high standard compared to the sort of thing that was being produced at the time. Before 1830 Berlioz was still under the spell of Gluck (if, indeed, he ever emerged from it) and his conventionality is that of the great master of opera rather than that of the familiar French chanson. ‘The Dead Shepherdess,’ dating from 1827, is remarkable for its classic dignity and beauty. The Irish Songs, in 1829 and 1830, composed to words by Thomas Moore, show the surging up of the revolutionary fervor which took hold of him about this time and came to fruit in the Symphonie Fantastique that so startled and shocked Parisian audiences. The songs are in the strophic form, as were most of Berlioz’s songs, but otherwise they are unusual enough to prove a problem for the singer. They are by no means steady in quality, and doubtless there is evidenced a failure on the structural side, an inability to keep genius within firmly controlled limits. ‘At Sunset’ is typical. It is irregular and so filled with detail that it tends to become ‘spotty.’ It is obviously an attempt at atmosphere—at the same atmosphere upon which the recent French song-writers have built their reputation. The singer’s problem lies in keeping these details from protruding from the general design and still giving them their individual value. The task of selecting the essential in the song and keeping this to the fore is truly a task for the singer’s intellect, that intellect which is called on so little in the mass of French songs. ‘Rich and Rare’ has much sensuous beauty and is a real problem in expressive singing. ‘Farewell Bessy’ is altogether lovely. But the finest of the songs is the last, the ‘Elegy.’ Here Berlioz reaches a height of tragic impressiveness which he never equalled in his songs and equalled only rarely in his symphonic music. The effect of this song in concert is tremendous.

The song called ‘The Captive’ (three versions of it exist) is one of the best known and one of the simplest. Here Berlioz has been content with a conventional accompaniment and has spent his effort on the melody—an irregular and somewhat arbitrary melody, but one with a certain aristocratic charm which the singer must find for himself. The ‘Villanelle’ is perhaps the best of all. Here the originality of Berlioz’s genius finds expression within very narrow limits. The simple old form is combined with a harmonic energy that is admirable. ‘In the Graveyard’ is a study in the tragic mood, unconventional, needless to say, and thoroughly successful. Other songs which deserve mention are: ‘I Believe in Thee,’ a sentimental love song; ‘On the Lagoon,’ a slow barcarolle in six-eight time; and ‘Zaïde,’ a bolero that is highly effective for concert use.

François Louis Hippolyte Monpou (born 1804; died 1841) was the recognized song-writer of the romantic movement. He is now little more than a historical fact. In his early years he was an organist and conductor of church music, but his ability was not marked and he drifted looking for something to do. He gained some local fame in 1828 from his three-part setting of Béranger’s Si j’étais petit oiseau and was taken up in the drawing rooms as a representative of the romantic school. He took the drawing room verdict seriously and turned out a number of songs to the words of Hugo, Musset, Béranger, and others. His songs had a certain popular quality and an effect of boldness which suited the fancy of the romantic school. But his musicianship was faulty and his harmony and rhythm were awkward and unresourceful. After he became established as a song-writer he took to doing operas, some of which are melodically effective and dramatically vigorous.

II

Italy has for three centuries been deficient in art-songs, but she has produced a certain amount of lyric music which the student will discover and sing gladly from time to time, and a few of her song-writers should be mentioned here. Giuseppe Mercadante (1795-1870) was primarily an opera composer, but, unlike most of the Italian opera writers, produced a goodly number of songs. These are simple and florid, possessed of a certain Italian charm, but on the one hand too thin to rank as true interpretative music, and on the other somewhat too operatic to convey a simple lyrical sentiment. However, his vogue was great and he may be considered the originator of the modern Italian song tradition. The continuer of the tradition was Luigi Gordigiani (1806-1860), a peasant boy who showed marked talent for music and carried into his work a feeling for folk-song which was new to Italian music at the time. He was one of the first native collectors of folk-music and one of the first to appreciate it. He is known almost solely as a song-writer, and so popular have his songs become and so firmly have they remained in people’s hearts that he has with some justice been called ‘the Italian Schubert.’ However, we must not be from this led to suppose that he had anything like Schubert’s richness of melodic inspiration, musical resource, or genuine dramatic power. His songs are in every case supplied with the simplest accompaniment and in form do not go much beyond the folk-songs which are their model. They have a certain freedom, a development which is typical of the art-song rather than the folk-song. But their materials are of the simplest, and with their technical sameness and their general melancholy tinge they tend toward monotony. Among the loveliest of his songs is La Bianchina, a melody of much sweetness cast in the strophic form. Il Tempo Passato shows more energy and passion than is usual in Gordigiani. Some of his religious songs are effective, especially O Sanctissima Vergine Maria, which is said to have been admired by Chopin. We should mention also Gordigiani’s waltz songs, which are brilliant and effective without becoming cheap. Another Italian song writer, and one better known in foreign lands than Gordigiani, is Ciro Pinsuti (1829-1888), whose output was immense. He exemplifies Italian grace and suavity and imparted to his part-songs in particular a beauty which has carried them to singing societies the world over.