In early 1879 Karl Hahn –a German businessman who had made his fortune in Venezuela–, his wife Elena María Echenagucia and their children left the country to settle in Paris. For the Hahn family, music and, more broadly, the arts were essential, and this was reflected in the careful education of the children. It soon became clear, however, that the youngest, Reynaldo, who was three years old when they arrived in France, had a gift.
At six he sang and played the piano in one of the most influential salons in the city, that of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte; at nine he entered the Paris Conservatoire; at fifteen he composed the incidental music for L’obstacle by Alphonse Daudet; and at nineteen he premiered his first opera, L’île du rêve.
I don’t recall ever hearing a single note of this opera or of any of the other sixteen he composed. But the songs… ah, the songs are something else. Reynaldo Hahn, described as a man of great charm and a brilliant mind, a favourite in the Parisian salons, triumphed there with his elegant and refined songs, which he often presented himself while accompanying at the piano. We have heard some of them, often the best-known ones, and this week I would like to suggest one that is less familiar: Néère, with a poem by Leconte de Lisle.
Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, a renowned Hellenist, published Poèmes antiques in 1852, the first of three collections he would send to press (the fourth, unfinished, was published posthumously in 1895, the year after his death). Poèmes antiques included a set of eighteen poems, Études latines, from which Reynaldo Hahn chose ten to compose a cycle of the same name, completed in 1900; among those he left out is Phidylé, perhaps because a few years earlier Henri Duparc had already written a splendid song on those verses (or perhaps he simply wasn’t interested).
Hahn’s cycle has an unusual layout, with seven songs for voice and piano and three for soloists and choir; it is not an easy work to perform complete in a concert hall. But some of the songs are performed on their own, including the second one, Néère. As in the rest of the poems in the cycle, the verses draw on Greco Roman mythology; Néère, Neaera in English, is one of the Nereids, the daughters of Nereus and Doris, as beautiful as her many sisters (around fifty, according to most sources). Like them, she leads a relaxed life in the family palace at the bottom of the sea and occasionally appears to humans, without the malevolent intentions of other sea creatures.
With his characteristic elegance, Hahn sets this poem to music by evoking—or recreating, or however you wish to call it—the music of Ancient Greece, a music that is barely known. Since we are more familiar with sculpture and architecture, we may associate what we hear with the serenity and balance typical of those arts (at least in a certain period), and also, more broadly, with the orientalist currents of the time. In any case, it is a beautiful song, which we will hear performed by Véronique Gens and Susan Manoff.
Il me faut retourner aux anciennes amours:
L’Immortel qui naquit de la Vierge Thébaine,
Et les Jeunes Désirs et leur Mère inhumaine
Me commandent d’aimer toujours.
Blanche comme un beau marbre, avec ses roses joues,
Je brûle pour Néère aux yeux pleins de langueur;
Venus se précipite et consume mon cœur:
Tu ris, ô Néère, et te joues!
Pour apaiser les Dieux et pour finir mes maux,
D’un vin mûri deux ans versez vos coupes pleines;
Et sur l’autel rougi du sang pur des agneaux
Posez l’encens et les verveines.
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