Themes, (Leit)motives, and Cycles in Belle Époque Vocal Music

Abstract This chapter will consider the simultaneous and often intertwining influence of Wagner and Franck in French opera, song, and church music. The influence of Wagner appears most obviously in the operas of the French composers that succeeded Gounod and Meyerbeer. Massenet most famously introduced absorbed techniques of thematic association and recall in Manon and other works, yet with a loose treatment of themes that more resembles Puccini’s practice than the involved, contrapuntal motivic work of Wagner. Both Debussy and Fauré adopted Wagner’s leitmotivic technique, respectively, in Pelléas et Mélisande and Pénélope. Franck’s influence shows most notably in the song cycle. In both Chausson’s Poème de la mer et de l’amour and Ropartz’s Quatre poèmes d’après “l’Intermezzo” d’Heinrich Heine, themes and motives recur across the cycle. In the church repertoire, Franck’s influence perhaps shows in the common motive that reappears across Fauré’s Requiem, written precisely as the Belgian composer had begun to pioneer his new method of thematic working. In other composers, notably Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc, the motivic connections across song cycles are far more subtle. The song cycles of Fauré present perhaps the most radical adaption of Wagner’s leitmotivic technique in French vocal music. In La bonne chanson, Fauré developed motives throughout the songs with a fluidity and contrapuntal intensity reminiscent of late Wagner, permitting the French composer to abandon the symmetries of French verse in favor of a genuine musical prose.