Camille Mauclair, Ernest Chausson and the Trois Lieder

A practice that became popular in fin-de-siècle France was the creation of mélodies by French composers which they set to the words of poems by various French poets. This song form is a genre in which there is a deliberate and close relationship between text and melody, expressed with concision and clarity. Ernest Chausson (1855-1899) was one such composer and in 1896, during one of his most intensely creative periods, he wrote the accompanying music to three of Camille Mauclair’s poems, resulting in the composer’s opus 27, Trois Lieder. These piano pieces, to this day, have remained amongst the most popular of Chausson’s songs and are readily available on disc.

The aim of this paper is to trace the relationship between these two artists which led to such a collaboration and then to examine the lieder (mélodies) in some detail.