This theme remains clearly recognizable throughout the variations that follow, merely decorated with simple melodic filigree or slightly altered in rhythm. In keeping with the original operatic setting, Hahn’s Variations chantantes begin in an elegiac mood with a melody of dignified beauty lyrically sung out by the cello, a melody both courtly and sentimental. In Act IV scene 6 of Cavalli’s opera a high court official laments the tiresome rituals and constant intrigues of the Persian court and longs for a simpler life of ease and pleasure. Instead, Hahn reaches back for his musical inspiration to the 17th century, taking as his variation theme the aria Beato chi può (Blessed is he) from the opera Xerxes (1655) by Italian composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676). Situated in the rear-guard of musical developments of the time, this work offers no hint of the colourful dissonances and convulsive rhythms that within a few years would astonish Parisian audiences in the revolutionary ballets of Stravinsky: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). Witness his 1905 Variations chantantes sur un air ancien (Singing variations on an ancient air), which exhibit not even a whiff of modernism and could easily have been composed 50 years earlier. His musical aesthetic was refined, but conservative and essentially backward-looking, especially in matters of harmony. Hahn was a perfect fit for this Proustian Parisian world of the Belle Époque (1871-1914). He is equally well known as the sometime romantic partner of writer Marcel Proust, whose epic novel À la recherche du temps perdu paints in perfumed prose the social rituals and creeping decadence of a society ripe with elegance but rapidly approaching its best-before date. The Venezuelan-born French composer Reynaldo Hahn is best known for his contribution to the French song repertoire with his more than 100 mélodies published between 1890 and his death in 1947.
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