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Mélodie
A ''mélodie'' () is a form of French art song, arising in the mid-19th century. It is comparable to the German ''Lied''. A ''chanson'', by contrast, is a folk or popular French song. The literal meaning of the word in the French language is "melody". Nature The ''mélodie'' is often defined by comparison with the ''lied''. Pierre Bernac provides this comparison in ''The Interpretation of French Song'': Debussy goes on to write that 'clarity of expression, precision and concentration of form are qualities peculiar to the French genius.' These qualities are indeed most noticeable when again compared with the German genius, excelling as it does in long, uninhibited outpourings, directly opposed to the French taste, which abhors overstatement and venerates concision and diversity. Bernac writes that "the art of the greatest French composers is an art of suggestion", rather than explicit statement of feelings. The ''mélodie'' is noted for its deliberate and close relationship betw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reynaldo Hahn
Reynaldo Hahn (; 9 August 1874 – 28 January 1947) was a Venezuelan-born French composer, conductor, music critic, and singer. He is best known for his songs – ''mélodies'' – of which he wrote more than 100. Hahn was born in Caracas but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he lived most of his life there. Following the success of his song "''Si mes vers avaient des ailes''" (If my verses had wings), written when he was aged 14, he became a prominent member of ''fin de siècle'' French society. Among his closest friends were Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust. After the First World War, in which he served in the army, Hahn adapted to new musical and theatrical trends and enjoyed successes with his first opérette, ''Ciboulette'' (1923) and a collaboration with Sacha Guitry, the musical comedy ''Mozart (comédie musicale), Mozart'' (1926). During the Second World War Hahn, who was of Jewish descent, took refuge in Monaco, returning to Paris in 1945 where he w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his ''Pavane'', Requiem, ''Sicilienne'', nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style. Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a young boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the Ecole Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865, Faur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (; 7 January 189930 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite '' Trois mouvements perpétuels'' (1919), the ballet '' Les biches'' (1923), the '' Concert champêtre'' (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera '' Dialogues des Carmélites'' (1957), and the ''Gloria'' (1959) for soprano, choir, and orchestra. As the only son of a prosperous manufacturer, Poulenc was expected to follow his father into the family firm, and he was not allowed to enrol at a music college. Largely self-educated musically, he studied with the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became his mentor after the composer's parents died. Poulenc also made the acquaintance of Erik Satie, under whose tutelage he became one of a group of young composers known collectively as '' Les Six ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre Bernac
Pierre Louis Bernac (né Bertin; 12 January 1899 – 17 October 1979) was a French singer, a baryton-martin, known as an interpreter of the French mélodie. He had a close artistic association with Francis Poulenc, with whom he performed in France and abroad. Poulenc wrote 90 songs for him during their 25-year musical partnership. Bernac was well known as a teacher; among the singers who studied with him were Elly Ameling, Grace Bumbry, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Carol Neblett, Jessye Norman and Gérard Souzay. He gave masterclasses in France, Britain and the US. In retirement, Bernac wrote two highly regarded books about the interpretation of mélodies in general and Poulenc's in particular. Life and career Early years Bertin in Paris on 12 January 1899, and started his working career in his father's brokerage house. He later changed his surname to Bernac to avoid confusion with the actor Pierre Bertin.Schmidt, p. 216 He began taking singing lessons at the age of 18, and was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Duparc (composer)
Eugène Marie Henri Fouques Duparc (21 January 1848 – 12 February 1933) was a French composer of the late Romantic period. Biography Son of Charles Fouques-Duparc and Amélie de Guaita. Henri Fouques-Duparc was born in Paris. He studied piano with César Franck at the Jesuit College in the Vaugirard district and became one of his first composition pupils. Following military service in the Franco-Prussian War, he married Ellen MacSwiney, from Scotland, on 9 November 1871. In the same year, he joined Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine to found the Société Nationale de Musique. Duparc is best known for his 17 mélodies ("art songs"), with texts by poets such as Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Goethe. A mental illness, diagnosed at the time as " neurasthenia", caused him abruptly to cease composing at age 37, in 1885. He devoted himself to his family and his other passions, drawing and painting. But increasing vision loss after the turn of the century eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been '' Faust'' (1859); his '' Roméo et Juliette'' (1867) also remains in the international repertory. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his Ave Maria (an elaboration of a Bach piece), and ''Funeral March of a Marionette''. Born in Paris into an artistic and musical family Gounod was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris and won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome. His studies took him to Italy, Austria and then Prussia, where he met Felix Mendelssohn, whose advocacy of the music of Bach was an early influence on him. He was deeply religious, and after his return to Paris, he briefly considered becoming a priest. He composed prolifically, writing church music, songs, orchestral music and operas. Gounod's career was disrupt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claude Debussy
(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of ten to France's leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, ''Pelléas et Mélisande (opera), Pelléas et Mélisande''. Debussy's orchestral works include ''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' (1894), ''Nocturnes (Debussy), Nocturnes'' (1897–18 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, ''Boléro'' (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other compose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cinq Mélodies "de Venise"
''Cinq mélodies "de Venise"'', Op. 58, is a song cycle by Gabriel Fauré, of five mélodies for voice and piano. Composed in 1891, the cycle is based on five poems by Paul Verlaine,Orledge (1979), p. 295 from the collections ''Fêtes galantes'' and ''Romances sans paroles''.Nectoux (2004), p. 179 According to Fauré himself, the song cycle contains a number of musical themes which recur from song to song. He used a similar technique for his later song cycle '' La bonne chanson'', which was also based on Verlaine's poetry. Composition Fauré composed the first song, "Mandoline", in May 1891 in Venice.Nectoux (2004), p. 510 He was staying in the Palazzo Volkoff (or Wolkoff) on the Grand Canal, as a guest of Winnaretta Singer, the future Princess de Polignac. Among Singer's other guests were the painter Ernest Ange Duez and his wife Amélie. She was a singer, and entertained the group with Fauré's new composition. Only "Mandoline" and part of "En sourdine" were compos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine (; ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the ''fin de siècle'' in international and French poetry. Biography Early life Born in Metz, Verlaine was educated at the ''Lycée Impérial Bonaparte'' (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in ''La Revue du progrès'', a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chanson
A (, , french: chanson française, link=no, ; ) is generally any lyric-driven French song, though it most often refers to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music. The genre had origins in the monophonic songs of troubadours and trouvères, though the only polyphonic precedents were 16 works by Adam de la Halle and one by Jehan de Lescurel. Not until the '' ars nova'' composer Guillaume de Machaut did any composer write a significant number of polyphonic chansons. A broad term, the word "chanson" literally means "song" in French and can thus less commonly refers to a variety of (usually secular) French genres throughout history. This includes the songs of chansonnier, '' chanson de geste'' and Grand chant; court songs of the late Renaissance and early Baroque music periods, '' air de cour''; popular songs from the 17th to 19th century, '' bergerette'', '' brunette'', '' chanson pour boire'', ''pastourelle'', and vaudeville; art son ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (; 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are ''Manon'' (1884) and ''Werther'' (1892). He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music. While still a schoolboy, Massenet was admitted to France's principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1863, he composed prolifically in many genres, but quickly became best known for his operas. Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
