Rethinking the Canon and French Identity

Works for Violin and Piano

Thomas May

While Marguerite Canal and Charlotte Sohy lived under the limitations imposed on them by society’s conventions regulating gender, both were raised in a milieu ideally suited to nurturing young artists. And both flourished in their early years: in 1920, for example, Canal became only the second woman, after Lili Boulanger in 1913, to win the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome.

So why did they not become part of the repertoire? Why are their names not taken for granted the way that of their elder Gabriel Fauré is? These are questions to ponder in the fascinating juxtaposition of French composers on tonight’s program by Renaud Capuçon and Guillaume Bellom. The pair of artists also consider questions of identity—what is “French music”?—by linking these variants on Romantic impulses with a contemporary piece dedicated to them by Pascal Dusapin.

As for the canonical Fauré, it is worth recalling that when he gave the public premiere of the Sonata that closes this program, he joined with the pioneering violinist Marie Tayau. This remarkable virtuoso had only recently made music history herself by founding the all-female Sainte-Cécile String Quartet, which was praised (and condemned) as a bold move to champion equality. Their performance helped establish Fauré’s reputation as a composer.

Melody, Poetry, Craft

Marguerite Canal, who was born in 1890 in Toulouse into a highly cultured family, benefited her parents’ encouragement to pursue her obvious musical talents. At the age of 13 she entered the Paris Conservatoire, where Gabriel Fauré served on the faculty (and, as of 1905, was general director), and in 1917 became one of the first women to conduct orchestral concerts in France.

Canal was also a gifted singer and accompanist—Camille SaintSaëns suggested she devote her career to singing—but in the 1920s composition became her primary focus. Her output is especially rich in art songs, and she also produced many vocal and instrumental works for children. Despite her long life (she died just short of 88 in 1978), setbacks unfortunately kept Canal from completing some of her most ambitious projects, including an opera-in-progress: Tlass Atka, also known as Le pays blanc, which was inspired by a Jack London story.

A string of first prizes from the Conservatoire attests to the great promise of the emerging composer, culminating in the Grand Prix de Rome in 1920, which she earned for Don Juan, a cantata for voice and orchestra. Canal found Rome very much to her liking, and it was here that she composed her large-scale Sonata for Violin and Piano, completing it in 1922.

The four-movement work bears an obvious kinship with the contributions that César Franck and Gabriel Fauré made to the genre. Most importantly, though, it conveys a sense of Canal’s individuality: her distinct gifts for poignant melody; for expressing deeply felt emotion through exquisitely crafted, well-balanced textures; and for a radiant poetry all her own.

Opening with a flowing melody on piano alone that later reaches serene heights on the violin, the first movement establishes a mood of gentle contemplation. The eruption of nervous energy in the second—unusually marked “Sourd et haletant” (Subdued and breathless)—makes an especially startling contrast; a middle section of troubled calm only intensifies that effect. Canal’s background as a singer and songwriter is especially evident in the soulful third movement, while the bravura finale weaves together the threads of agitated passion, melancholy, and liberating song heard throughout the Sonata.

“Something Floats”

Like Marguerite Canal, Pascal Dusapin also spent formative years in Rome—in his case, in the late 1970s—although his early impulses comprise a wildly eclectic brew: along with the usual classical suspects, jazz (he became particularly fascinated with the sound of the clarinet in jazz), the Doors, the organ, Edgard Varèse, Franco Donatoni, and Iannis Xenakis, with whom Dusapin studied for several years.

Dusapin established himself as a giant among French composers of the post-Boulez, post–World War II generation. Remarkably prolific across a wide spectrum, from solo and chamber compositions to large-scale works for orchestra and the stage (operas are a significant part of his creative work), Dusapin defies categorization. Similarly, his interests are omnivorous, encompassing such areas as literature, theater, photography, architecture, visual arts, philosophy, and morphogenesis—all of which have left a mark on his oeuvre.

It is thus not surprising that the composer is drawn to multidisciplinary collaborations. His partnerships with other musicians likewise have stimulated important developments in his areas of focus. The synergy that Dusapin found with Renaud Capuçon inspired him to complete his first concerto for the violin—Aufgang (German for “ascent” as well as the more concrete “staircase”), composed 2008–11 —which Capuçon premiered in 2013 in Cologne.

“I can’t really say I collaborate with [my performer friends] during composing: I write partly for the person who is going to perform the piece and partly I invent that person in my head,” Dusapin explained in an interview with the cellist Anssi Karttunen. “When I wrote the Violin Concerto for Renaud Capuçon, I kept writing for him and yet not for him.” The single-movement Forma fluens for violin and piano further develops this artistic partnership. Capuçon and his duo partner Guillaume Bellom introduced the work in 2018; Dusapin has dedicated the score, which demands extremes of emotional and technical expression, to both artists.

A literary inspiration also informs Forma fluens: a passage from the second volume of Histoire de la littérature récente, by the writer, poet, dramatist, and translator Olivier Cadiot, who has also served as a librettist for Dusapin. The text that captivated Dusapin describes a kind of epiphany that Cadiot likens to using the pedal at the piano to “free the note of its felt hammer” or to stumbling upon a moment near the end of a novel that lasts in the memory: “One page is enough and, when the book is closed, something floats: forma fluens, as they used to say in the Middle Ages; that hidden quality that waits patiently to be revealed through a work of art or some gracious gesture by anyone—that is its mission.”

A Rediscovered Gem

When the French cellist Héloïse Luzzati launched La Boîte à Pépites (“the jewel box”), a new recording label intended “to breathe new life into unknown or at best barely known works by women,” she chose a single composer as the focus for the inaugural release: Charlotte Sohy: Compositrice de la Belle Epoque, which appeared just last year, is a 3-CD box set that gathers her orchestral and piano music along with her string quartets.

Sohy’s parents recognized her prodigal gifts and made sure she had access to the best musical education, even ordering a CavailléColl instrument to be custom-built in their home when young Charlotte began studying organ. Formative influences on Sohy, who was born in 1887 in Paris, were Vincent d’Indy, Albert Roussel, and Louis Vierne. Her musical language is “expressive and neoromantic,” according to the retired conservatory director François-Henri Labey, who happens to be one of Sohy’s 21 grandchildren. Charlotte married fellow composer and conductor Marcel Labey. In recent decades, François-Henri Labey has curated and rescued from unjust obscurity some 40 of his grandmother’s works.

In an interview with Camille Villanove, Labey described Sohy as particularly sensitive to literature and adept in “the art of conversation.” Indeed, she was also a playwright and novelist who remained fascinated by “the articulation of text and music,” deploying “her lyrical vein and a flawless prosody in her songs, her choral pieces, and her opera.”

Sohy’s music was played by her contemporaries during the final gasp of the Belle Époque, and her husband supported her efforts. But Labey points to the drastic shift in aesthetic priorities following World War I, suggesting that it rendered her style unfashionable.

Entrenched misogyny must also be blamed—above all, for the long hiatus when her legacy was completely overlooked while other, more mediocre composers found a regular place on programs. Sohy tried to circumvent this obstacle by signing her scores with the ambiguous “Ch. Sohy” and also used male pseudonyms on occasion.

Thème varié exists both as a work for solo violin and orchestra and in the version heard tonight, for violin and piano. Composed in 1921 and dedicated to her friend (and fellow classmate) since childhood, Nadia Boulanger, this brief but affecting piece initially consigns the theme to the violin’s low range but allows it to ascend naturally—the beginning of Sohy’s process of revealing new characteristics contained within its yearning contours. Rather than a set of variations, what follows is a continual unfolding of a single extended idea of the theme, like a poem uttered in a single breath.

“Everything to Tempt a Gourmet”

Composed in 1875–6, the Violin Sonata No. 1 marked a breakthrough in Gabriel Fauré’s recognition as a composer. Of the public premiere in January 1877, he enthusiastically reported that it enjoyed “more success this evening than I could ever have hoped for.” (The scherzo was even encored.) “Saint-Saëns said that he felt that sadness that mothers feel when they see their children are too grown up to need them any more!… Mlle. Tayau’s performance was impeccable.”

Saint-Saëns had mentored and championed the young Fauré and even provided him entrée into one of the most coveted social circles in Paris by introducing him to the incomparably sophisticated and highly networked mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot—one of the protagonists of Orlando Figes’s brilliant exploration of 19th-century cultural history, The Europeans (2019). The talent of her violinist son Paul impressed Fauré, who dedicated the Sonata to him. His ties to the family were in fact even closer: in love with Pauline’s youngest daughter, Marianne (also a singer), Fauré was devastated when she suddenly broke off their engagement.

Cast on a grand scale in four movements, his Sonata shows an enormous leap in musical confidence. Saint-Saëns put it memorably: “In this sonata you can find everything to tempt a gourmet: new forms, excellent modulations, unusual tone colors, and the use of unexpected rhythms. And a magic floats above everything, encom- passing the whole work, causing the crowd of usual listeners to accept the unimagined audacity as something quite normal. With this work Monsieur Fauré takes his place among the masters.”

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in The New York Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The Englishlanguage editor for the Lucerne Festival, he also writes program notes for the Ojai Festival in California.