1874–1947 · France, Venezuela · 20th century
Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) was born in Caracas but spent most of his life in Paris. A composer, pianist, conductor and music critic, he became known for his mélodies, French art songs of which he wrote a little over a hundred. The site has two of his songs for voice and piano.
Reynaldo Hahn was born in Caracas on 9 August 1874. His mother came from Venezuela; his father, a German Jew from Hamburg, had come to the country to seek his fortune, made a career as an engineer and businessman, and became a close friend of President Antonio Guzmán Blanco. When the president's enemies began to threaten the family, they moved to Paris, where the future composer grew up.
At home the boy grew up speaking German, Spanish and English. In Paris the family soon made well-connected friends, and in Princess Mathilde's salon Reynaldo made his public debut as a singer when he was six. At eight he began lessons in composition with an Italian teacher, and in 1883 he wrote his first waltz for piano.
In 1885 Reynaldo was admitted to the preparatory class of the Paris Conservatoire. His teachers included Albert Lavignac and Théodore Dubois; he studied composition with Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet and worked privately with Camille Saint-Saëns. His fellow students included Maurice Ravel and Alfred Cortot. With Massenet, Hahn formed a friendship and a mentoring bond that lasted all his life.
The Prix de Rome, France's top musical scholarship, was closed to Hahn: only French nationals could enter, and his family did not have French citizenship. Massenet also remarked that, with well-off parents, Hahn did not need such support.
While still a student, Hahn set Victor Hugo's poem as the song "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" (the title means "If my verses had wings"), and it quickly became famous. The song was inscribed to his sister Maria, who was married to the painter Raimundo de Madrazo. In their house Reynaldo came to know Alphonse Daudet and in 1890 provided stage music for Daudet's play L'obstacle.
In 1893 the singer Sybil Sanderson performed Hahn's cycle "Chansons grises", to poems by Paul Verlaine, in the Daudet household. The poet attended and wept with emotion.
Hahn's vocal works came into fashion, and he became a regular guest in the best Paris salons, where he performed his own songs and the music of other composers. In those circles he met Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond de Goncourt, Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt. He wrote a book about her in 1930.
Hahn met Proust in 1894 at Madeleine Lemaire's salon. In 1894–1896 the two were in a close relationship: they travelled together, made plans together and exchanged letters, which were later published. The relationship grew into a lifelong friendship. Many details of those years went into Jean Santeuil, an early novel that Proust left unfinished, and Hahn was the inspiration for its hero.
Hahn was also friends with Liane de Pougy and Cléo de Mérode. Like Proust and Bernhardt, he took the side of Dreyfus. He grew close to Bernhardt at the end of 1896: he accompanied her to London and on her tours, and he wrote music for her productions.
The Opéra-Comique staged Hahn's first opera, L'île du rêve ("The Island of Dreams"), in 1898. The press was hostile, and the production was taken off after seven performances. In 1899 Hahn became music critic of the newspaper La Presse. His second opera, La Carmélite, was given in December 1902 at the same theatre: the audience received it politely, but it did not settle into the repertoire.
After this setback Hahn stepped back from opera. His chamber suite of 1905, Le Bal de Béatrice d'Este, is still among his best-known and most frequently played works. Two ballets came next, La Fête chez Thérèse (1910) and Le Dieu bleu (1912). The latter was written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; until then the company had not presented a French composer's ballet.
Hahn also appeared as a conductor. In 1903 his performances of Mozart's Don Giovanni were praised for their lightness and for a fidelity to the composer's text that was unusual at the time. In 1906, at the Salzburg Festival marking the 150th anniversary of Mozart's birth, the Vienna Philharmonic played under Hahn in Don Giovanni, while Gustav Mahler took The Marriage of Figaro.
When the First World War broke out, Hahn was over the age for conscription, but he volunteered for the front all the same. Through most of the conflict he worked as an adjutant's clerk near the front; he rose to corporal in 1917, and later he was moved to a desk at the Ministry of War in Paris. Whenever he could, he went on composing: there was music for his regiment, and a children's song cycle to verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. His service brought him the Croix de Guerre and a place in the Legion of Honour.
From 1920 Hahn taught at the École Normale de Musique: Alfred Cortot, who headed the newly founded school, invited him to be professor of interpretation and singing. There he mixed with Pablo Casals, Jacques Thibaud and Nadia Boulanger. Hahn had a reputation for demanding a great deal of singers; he wrote articles, and in 1921 he published a book, Du chant ("On Singing"), on interpretation and vocal technique.
In 1923 Ciboulette, Hahn's first operetta, had its premiere at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. The critics welcomed it, and the box-office takings were enormous. The composer himself had doubts: the heroine is called Ciboulette, which means "chives", and the name struck him as rather unromantic. Even so, he accepted the offer, which came from the playwright Robert de Flers, an old friend.
In December 1925 the musical comedy Mozart, Hahn's joint work with Sacha Guitry, opened in Paris. The piece gave a free account of the composer's early years; the young Mozart was played by Yvonne Printemps, Guitry's wife. In the score Hahn combined extracts from Mozart's own works with his original music. The show ran in Paris for seven months, and in 1926 it was presented in London.
In 1931 Hahn's piano concerto had its premiere: the soloist was Magda Tagliaferro, the dedicatee, and the composer himself conducted. In 1933 Hahn became music critic of Le Figaro. In March 1935 his opera Le marchand de Venise ("The Merchant of Venice"), after Shakespeare, was staged at the Paris Opéra; he had begun it during the war.
During the Second World War, fearing Nazi anti-Semitism, Hahn was forced to leave Paris: in 1940 he left the capital and lived in Cannes and Monte Carlo. He came back in 1945, was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and took charge of the Paris Opéra. In 1946, with Tagliaferro and the singer Ninon Vallin, he toured, giving concerts in five cities: London, Geneva, Brussels, Marseille and Toulon.
Hahn fell ill and was operated on for a brain tumour. He died in Paris on 28 January 1947. His burial place is Père Lachaise cemetery, close to Proust's grave. After his death his music was largely overlooked for a long time, and only at the end of the 20th century did interest return: his songs and piano works began to be heard more often.
Hahn wrote in many genres: operas and operettas, ballets, orchestral works, chamber music, music for theatre and film, and piano pieces. But what made his name was the mélodie, the French art song, in which music and poetry form a single whole. He wrote a little over a hundred, the bulk of them from 1888 up to the close of the First World War; once the appetite for piano-accompanied songs shrank, he moved on to other forms.
The influence of Massenet is audible in his early songs, but Hahn considered Gabriel Fauré the greatest master of the genre. He liked the poetry of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier and Paul Verlaine. His cycles include Chansons grises to words by Verlaine, Rondels, Études latines to words by Leconte de Lisle, Venezia, six songs in the Venetian dialect, Les feuilles blessées to words by Jean Moréas, and Five Little Songs to words by Stevenson. For the piano Hahn wrote mostly in the first half of his career: ten waltzes, a sonatine, études, and pieces for four hands and for two pianos. His largest piano work, Le Rossignol éperdu, consists of 53 short pieces.
Hahn composed incidental music for more than twenty productions between 1890 and 1939, and in 1934 he wrote the music for two films. Among his orchestral works two concertos stand out: one for violin (1928) and one for piano (1931). Hahn's musical outlook took shape in the 19th century, and even in Le Dieu bleu, whose plot draws on Hinduism, he did not add oriental colouring but kept his usual salon style.
Besides the cycles, two collections of twenty songs each were published in Hahn's lifetime. In his chamber music the influence of Fauré, whom he saw as the last of the great composers, is noticeable: in the Piano Quintet the echoes are strongest in the slow movement in C-sharp minor, while in the Violin Sonata Hahn breaks with convention and makes most of the finale tender and wistful instead of lively. The late Piano Quartet of 1946 has three movements and moves between calm and more restless episodes. Of his stage works, the operetta Ciboulette has lasted longest: after its 1923 premiere it was revived in Paris several times, and it remains in the French repertoire.
The site has two of Hahn's songs for voice and piano, "À Chloris" and "L'Heure exquise"; both are at an upper-intermediate level. "L'Heure exquise" ("The Exquisite Hour") belongs to the cycle Chansons grises, where it is the best-known number: a quiet song whose accompaniment uses a chordal pattern that hardly changes.