Henri Duparc

Born in Paris, Henri Duparc was one of the supreme French romantic song writers, although his surviving music represents only a tiny fragment of what he might have left us had his long life not been blighted by an incapacitating illness. He studied composition with César Franck, served in the Franco-Prussian war and befriended Camille Saint-Saëns, with whom he travelled to Germany to hear the music of Richard Wagner. "Do not write much, but let it be very good", was Franck's advice to Duparc, and after his Cello Sonata (1867) Duparc completed only a handful of piano pieces, two brief but beautiful orchestral works (Aux Étoiles – 1874 and Lénore – 1875) and seventeen songs (or melodies), before an incurable neurological illness forced him to abandon composing at the age of 35. He destroyed all but a handful of his works-in-progress (including an unfinished opera) and turned to religion for comfort as he gradually lost his sight. But the works that he did leave us glow with an intensely poetic sensibility, and an exquisite craftsmanship. Duparc's seventeen surviving mélodies - whether the languorous idyll of "Phidylé", the surging nostalgia of "La vie antérieure" or Duparc's masterpiece, the brooding, ecstatic "L'invitation au voyage" – now form the pinnacle of the French song repertoire: some of the most perfect unions of words and music in the French (or any) language.