Ravel and His Contemporaries

Around the turn of the twentieth century the mélodie claimed a new place in French musical life, recognised increasingly as a genre that could exploit the accomplished musicianship of professional and specialist performers, and compel serious critical attention. Evident even in the changing priorities of the quintessential salon mélodiste Reynaldo Hahn, the new status of song would be confirmed in the riotous reception of Ravel’s Histoires naturelles (1907). Ravel’s mélodies are at the core of this chapter, the composer’s preoccupation with the interplay of poetic and musical form, and with the rhythms and assonances of text, offering guiding threads across an immensely varied body of work. Setting Ravel’s mélodies alongside key works by Hahn, Charles Koechlin and Albert Roussel, together with Lili Boulanger’s transcendent 1914 cycle Clairières dans le ciel , the chapter traces some of the continuities of style, practice and influence that sustained French art song across forty years of seismic musical and cultural change.