Franck, Chausson

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At a time when the Parisian audience was rather looking for the thrills of the great opera, and that the string quartet genre seemed a thing confined to Germany (and the 1870 war certainly didn’t help relationships with France, including the musical ones), César Franck’s Quartet (1890) acts as a free spirit. “I wanted a very long, expressive phrase, with a single origin, without repetition, without turning back on itself,” wrote the composer to a friend. This treasure of romantic music thus requires multiple listening sessions in order to perceive all the details from this “fleeting” line, which reflects in the veiled memory of the first measures—it’s the very essence of the cyclic principle, which was so dear to Franck. With his quartet, he opens the door to Debussyan forms (hey, Debussy himself also wrote for one quartet only, same for Ravel) and a French-style modernism—even if it’s sometimes tinged with some Brahms, curiously. For the second piece of the album, the excellent Quatuor Zaïde (founded in 2009, awarded with many international prizes, an ensemble that you may have heard at the Berliner Philharmonie, at the Barbican and at Wigmore Hall in London, at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, no less…) enlists the pianist Jonas Vitaud and the mezzo Karine Deshayes for Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, a masterwork from 1899—a dark, ample and desperate piece of music, which is even more singular when you know that the composer didn’t have anything to complain about at the time. He incidentally wrote: “I am writing a lugubrious song. [...] It’s about a violent despair of love. I am not at all in this frame of mind. So what, sincerity? A joke? Or I am preparing myself a trick… Not at all. I’ve found it. I feel the pain I would have if I found myself in that position and I feel it even more because I find myself happier.” © SM/Qobuz