Lea Desandre

The Poetry of the Idyll: From the Grand Siècle to the Sixties

by Nicola Cattò

From the mid-17th century pages of Michel Lambert and Sébastien Le Camus to the 1960s (of the 20th century) with Françoise Hardy and Barbara: the connecting threads are a voice, a lute—used throughout, even anachronistically (?) in Satie’s piano works or in the operatic accompaniments of Debussy and Offenbach—and love itself, sung at times as adolescent longing, at others embedded in the idyllic (this is also the title of the album recorded with this same programme by the two artists in 2023 for Erato) vision of Arcadia, or tinged with the erotic (and homoerotic) languor of turn-of-the-century France, with Reynaldo Hahn and André Messager and the world of Le Chat Noir, the legendary cabaret of Montmartre.

One voice, yes—but at times two, as Thomas Dunford will not only play his lute but will also join Lea Desandre in song. With the same freedom that leads us to view a Sarabande by Robert De Visée, celebrated lutenist and violist da gamba at the court of the Sun King, as not so far removed from Erik Satie’s distilled, esoteric piano pieces (here, a Gnossienne and a Gymnopédie), Satie being a close friend of Debussy (whom he playfully dubbed “Dieu-bussy”).

Let us try to lend some order to this programme. We begin with the Arcadian idyll—a mythical space where shepherds and shepherdesses frolic peacefully in the countryside, tending their flocks and playing the flute (remember the first Bucolic? “silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena”…), in a world immortalised by painters, poets and musicians who exalt love’s desire and the sorrow of love unfulfilled or unreturned. We find ourselves in the France of the Grand Siècle, at the court of Louis XIV, who gathered around him numerous artists and musicians—many of them now little-known—such as Honoré d’Ambruys, whose Le doux silence de nos bois opens the concert.

We then encounter Michel Lambert, master of chamber music at court, a prolific composer sought after in every aristocratic salon, author of over three hundred Airs de cour, so widely appreciated they were printed and circulated beyond elite circles. Yet in listening to Ma bergère est tendre et fidèle, we sense a certain bitter irony: the shepherdess in question is not so faithful after all, preferring her dog and the shepherd’s staff to her lover. The theme of love’s suffering is, indeed, a constant in these Airs, where the bond between text and music (to which the French have clung obsessively for centuries, far more than us Italians) is used to precisely trace shifting emotional states.

This is especially clear in the mini-trilogy of Chansons by Marc-Antoine Charpentier included here: in Celle qui fait tout mon tourment, the voice begins a cappella, perfectly portraying the solitude of the rejected lover, then rises to a climax of anger and pain marked by quickening tempo and almost frantic momentum. The contrast with the next piece, Auprès du feu, l’on fait l’amour, with its dance-like rhythm, is striking: here, love reaches its physical fulfilment. The trilogy concludes with desolation: first rage, then satisfaction, and finally heartbreak at the betrayal of “l’infidèle Sylvie”—evoking the relictae women of Ovid’s Heroides, the classical model that underpins this lament. The two Chansons by Lambert presented later (Ombre de mon amant and Vos mépris chaque jour) take us further still: into the funereal mourning of a love now lost.

A reverence for classicism—inflected with a more modern sensitivity—emerges in late 19th-century Paris, where the famed Chat Noir cabaret on the Montmartre hill served as a meeting place for bohemians, artists, pseudo-artists, writers and musicians of all stripes, eager to challenge social and artistic conventions while steeped in the classical tradition. Even Debussy would play the piano there and accompany the guests, alongside his friend Satie.

A few years later, in the salon of Madame Lemaire, the young Reynaldo Hahn, lover of Proust, would perform and sing his chansons (while keeping a cigarette in his mouth that was never to fall!). Both Néère and À Chloris filter a sensuality—soft yet vibrant—through the lens of classical allusion, drawing on popular literary tropes such as the rose (Je ne crois pas que les rois mêmes / Aient un bonheur pareil au mien). In Hahn’s music—he was born in Venezuela—there is a hushed melancholy, an intimacy that takes us directly back to the spirit of the 17th-century idyll: the love declaration remains suspended, gender roles deliberately left undefined.

The theme of disguise, in a parodic sense, also lies at the heart of Offenbach’s opéra bouffe La belle Hélène (1864), a grand satire of bourgeois mores and the prudish court of Napoleon III. The short aria by the protagonist once again exalts love, Venus and Adonis, and love’s purifying and incendiary power. Also rich in irony is J’ai deux amants, taken from L’amour masqué (1923) by André Messager, where it is asserted that men are fools, and so it’s better to have—precisely—two lovers, while convincing each that he is the “serious one”!

This is a far cry from the discreet and mysterious atmosphere of Debussy’s Pelléas (1902): Mélisande’s scene (Mes longs cheveux) speaks of anticipation, in a kind of neo-medieval miniature in which a woman awaits her beloved from her tower, awash in the symbolism that overflows from Maeterlinck’s play. Yet the a cappella opening and intimate tone reveal a striking link between Debussy’s belle époque and the grand siècle of Charpentier…

Final chapter: from chanson to chansonnier, from the Sun King to the turbulent France of the 1960s (though the three songs performed today—two by Françoise Hardy, one by Barbara—predate the fateful events of 1968). But the themes remain much the same, and they are universal: solitude, reciprocated or unrequited love, the yearning for happiness, the ideal of the idyll. Even the imagery in the lyrics is familiar: spring, flowers, gardens, birdsong, sunlight, painful wounds.

The musical writing (though “antiqued” here by the use of the lute) is certainly different, but once again it is the declaimed word that takes precedence. After all, Barbara was one of the first women to write and compose her own songs, while also interpreting the works of legends like Édith Piaf and Jacques Brel.

Three centuries of French song, then, gathered into brief, luminous sonic postcards: because the language of the idyll, evidently, has never truly changed in its essential truths.