Reynaldo Hahn
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.
[1] Carlos Hahn, the eldest son of a Jewish family in Hamburg, emigrated to Venezuela in 1845 at the age of twenty-two, making a highly successful business career there.
[4] Among the family's Parisian friends was Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I; the young Hahn sang for her, and made his public debut at the age of six, at a musical soirée in her drawing room.
[6] He went on to study piano with Émile Decombes (in the same class as Maurice Ravel and Alfred Cortot), harmony with Albert Lavignac and Théodore Dubois, and composition with Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet.
[11] While still a student Hahn had an early success with his mélodie "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" (If my verses had wings) to a poem by Victor Hugo.
Le Figaro took it up – "We feel we must reproduce this graceful piece which obviously denotes a delicate and original musician" – and devoted half a broadsheet page to printing the words and music.
[12] Hahn dedicated "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" to his sister Maria, who had married the painter Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta.
[23] Later in that year Hahn formed another of his closest friendships: he had long admired the actress Sarah Bernhardt,[24] and at the end of 1896 he met her and quickly became part of her inner circle of friends and helpers.
Emma Calvé played the main role of Louise de La Vallière, Messager was once again the conductor, and the piece was lavishly mounted,[33] but it was received politely rather than with enthusiasm, and did not gain a place in the operatic repertoire.
The show opened in December 1925 at the Théâtre Édouard VII, receiving enthusiastic reviews: Messager, writing in Le Figaro, called it "a piece of rare quality", and commented that the score was so good that it was hard to detect where Mozart's music ended and Hahn's began: this, he said, was the highest possible praise.
[53] At the end of that year there were two versions running on Broadway: the Guitry company played the French original for a limited season,[54] and an English translation ran at another theatre, starring Frank Cellier and Irene Bordoni.
The young director Claude Autant-Lara made a fairly free adaptation of the stage work, with Simone Berriau in the title role; it cam out in Paris in November 1933, and was well received.
His fidelity to Mozart was remarked on in the press: after years of productions at the Opéra-Comique in which the composer's recitatives in Figaro were replaced by spoken dialogue, Hahn used a new, more scholarly text edited by Adolphe Boschot.
He was less at risk there from Nazi anti-Semitic persecution, but narrowly avoided being killed by the explosion of a stray shell from a British submarine aimed at a German warship moored near his rooms on the seafront at Monte Carlo.
[7] According to a 2020 analysis: Hahn's biographer Jacques Depaulis writing in 2006, comments that many composers suffer a period of neglect after their deaths and are then rediscovered, a process known in France as "la traversée du désert" – crossing the desert.
[70] In 1961, 14 years after the composer's death, the musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt dismissed Hahn as "a talented gossip who had a gift for grinding out operettas and little, tastefully performed ballads in limitless quantities".
[71][n 4] In the last decades of the 20th century there was a revival in interest in Hahn's music: Johnson (2002) refers to "an ever-widening range of his mélodies to be heard regularly on the concert platform".
[82] La Carmélite (1902), a period piece set in the reign of Louix XIV, made little impact, although its conductor, Messager, who was musical director at Covent Garden as well as at the Opéra Comique, considered staging it in London; the idea was not realised.
[85] Neither of Hahn's next two operas – Nausicaa (1919, libretto by René Fauchois) and La Colombe de Bouddha (Buddha's Dove, 1921), a one-act work with words by André Alexandre[n 5] – was written for Paris, and neither was staged there.
[90] Hahn left an unfinished opera, Le Oui des jeunes filles (The Maidens' Consent), which Büsser completed; it was given by the Opéra-Comique company in June 1949.
In a study of opérette, James Harding writes that Hahn's score, though in the tradition of earlier composers, specifically Lecocq, "rejuvenates the old technique with a singular brightness of melody and adroit combinations of voice and instrument".
[93] When the work was first given in London, eighty years after the Paris premiere, the critic Michael Kennedy wrote, "I cannot imagine why it is not in the regular international repertoire, for in many respects it is the equal of Fledermaus and The Merry Widow … there is not a weak number in the piece".
[83] Further musical comedies followed: Le Temps d'aimer (1926), Ô mon bel inconnu (1933, with Guitry), and Beaucoup de bruit pour rien (Much Ado About Nothing, 1936), a "comédie musicale shakespearienne".
[97] Among the best known of Hahn's orchestral works is the suite Le Bal de Béatrice d'Este (1905), for a small ensemble of wind instruments, harps, piano and percussion.
[99] The concerto is described in The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music as "a charming work" with an opening theme that has "an English flavour, easily lyrical" leading to variations "full of sharp, sparkling contrasts … although no deep emotions are touched this is a delightful piece".
[101] For the theatre, Hahn composed incidental music for more than 20 productions between 1890 and 1939, employing a variety of forces, from mezzo-soprano and children's chorus or soloists and two pianos to full orchestra.
In the Piano Quintet (written in 1922 and published the following year) there are stylistic and thematic echoes of Fauré, particularly in the C-sharp minor slow movement, although in a 2001 analysis Francis Pott also notes the influence of Dvořák.
Some are in conventional forms, including a set of ten waltzes (1896), a sonatine (1907), Thème varié sur le nom de Haydn (1910) and two études (1927, his only post-war piano works).
In 2006 Depaulis listed recordings of Hahn mélodies by, among others, the sopranos Mady Mesplé and Felicity Lott, the mezzo-sopranos Susan Graham, Marie-Nicole Lemieux and Anne-Sofie von Otter, the tenors Martyn Hill and Ian Bostridge and the baritones Didier Henry and Stephen Varcoe.
[116] Of Hahn's stage works, Ciboulette was recorded by EMI in 1983, with a cast headed by Mesplé in the title role, and José van Dam (Duparquet) and Nicolai Gedda (Antonin).
