Ernest Chausson

Amédée-Ernest Chausson (b. 1855–d. 1899) was born in Paris to a wealthy contractor and his wife. Although he obtained a law degree in 1876, music was his true passion. He entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied briefly with Jules Massenet and then with César Franck. Between 1879 and 1883 he made several journeys to Bayreuth and became an ardent Wagnerian. He served as secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique from 1886 until his death. Chausson and his wife, Jeanne, maintained an active salon that drew many prominent figures from all the arts, and he developed close relationships with many of them, most notably the young Claude Debussy. Despite his happy family life (which included five children) and comfortable surroundings, as a composer Chausson was beset with crippling self-doubts. Struggling to express his feelings with as much emotional honesty and satisfying artistry as possible, he continually found himself “erupt[ing] with rage at seeing how what I can do is so far from what I would like to do, from what I seem to hear in my head” (from a letter of 1884). Friends ascribed the melancholy in his music to this obsessive search for what Vincent d’Indy called “the better,” to a profound empathy with the suffering of others, and to deep apprehension that critics would dismiss him merely as a wealthy amateur imitating Franck and Wagner—as indeed many did. Despite his insecurities, Chausson composed notable chamber and orchestral works, a substantial body of mélodies, and one opera, Le roi Arthus. Most observers believed that Chausson finally achieved his own voice in the late 1890s, especially in the Piano Quartet of 1897. Tragically, however, his career ended soon thereafter, on 10 June 1899: riding a bicycle at his country estate, he apparently lost control going down a hill and crashed head-first into a wall. Pierre Louÿs’s eloquent condolence letter to Mme. Chausson summed up the general reaction: “There was never a more excellent man . . . I was struck, each time, by the . . . admirable goodwill that radiated through each gesture. At every moment of his life, he felt compelled to bring happiness to people. Everyone loved him.” As his student Gustave Samazeuilh wrote, Chausson “will occupy an eminent place in the history of French music; a just recompense for a life devoted totally to the good, to work, and to the Ideal.”

Ernest Chausson's Viviane, “Déwagnérisation,” and the Problem of Descriptive Music

Ernest Chausson made two major aesthetic decisions in the mid-1880s: he resolved to “dewagnerize” himself and declared that he would no longer write program music. These developments were coeval with Chausson's revisions of Viviane (composed 1882–83, revised 1887 and 1893), a symphonic poem that shares musical material and subject matter with the composer's magnum opus, Le Roi Arthus (1886–95). Drawing on unpublished sketches and manuscripts of Viviane, I trace how Chausson's evolving aesthetics manifested themselves in his revisions of the work. While he suppressed evidence of Wagnerian mimicry, the process of “dewagnerization” was equivocal; Viviane ultimately became more beholden to certain Wagnerian dramaturgical ideals. At the same time, Chausson brought Viviane more closely in line with sonata procedures, inviting the listener to appreciate the work on its purely sonic merits at a time when the composer was becoming less sympathetic to the idea of “descriptive music.” I conclude by discussing the connections between Viviane and Le Roi Arthus and exploring how Chausson's reuse of material from the symphonic poem sheds light on issues of influence and signification in the opera.