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With Voice Lessons, Katherine Bergeron raises anew the complex and delicate matter of la mélodie française.1
Focusing on the years 1890 to 1910, she profiles, in a precise and masterly manner, a particular poetics: the pursuit of song that represents the absence of melody, of a diction - enunciation2 in English - a way of uttering that represents the absence of 'voice' and of emotion, of a supreme expressivity founded on the absence of externalization and on silence. Her consideration of the French mélodie commences with La Chanson d'Eve of Fauré (1910), continues with Debussy's oeuvre and concludes with Maurice Ravel, showing how his Histoires naturelles (1906) and Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913) depart from the predominant model, as does Debussy with the mélodies following Pelléas et Mélisande: from pre-war to cubism, when another ideal superceded the impulse of the 20 years that, for Katherine Bergeron, constitute the core of la mélodie française. She does not strictly follow the chronological order of the appearance of the mélodies, because her purpose is less to write a history of la mélodie française than to determine their essential aesthetic foundations.
In this way, Bergeron's approach stands out from other approaches, most notably that of Dutch musicologist Fritz Noske, a trailblazer in the study of the mélodie and a pioneer in the analysis of the genre, who sought to embrace, at once, all of the nineteenth century.3 Michel Faure, for example, has already remarked that the genre of the 'mélodie française' saw a unifying revolution in the 1870s: between 1830 and 1870, all sorts of vocal pieces were called 'mélodies', and sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between the romance, hymne, cantique and chanson.4 For instance, some pieces published as 'melodies' in this period differ considerably with respect to form, subject matter and even instrumentation. Indeed, 'romances' continued to be published in the late nineteenth century, and some of them really deserve the name 'mélodie'.
Katherine Bergeron does not enter into this debate, but suggests that the word 'mélodie' must not be understood as 'a type of vocal piece', but as 'a vague...