Ernest chausson death
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Chausson, Ernest
The prevailing mood of Chausson’s music is an entrancing melancholy…expressed in terms of the utmost sensitive refinement, beauty and aristocratic distinction of manner.’ The composer Kaikhosru Sorabji was summing up the rarified wonders of Ernest Chausson’s output – limited in quantity by his perfectionism and his untimely death, yet capturing the ‘zeitgeist’ of fin-de-siècle Paris, with its languor and heady mysticism, perhaps more strongly than his contemporaries.
Who was Ernest Chausson?
Chausson,was a sensitive and somewhat tortured character: beset by self-doubts, he was easily daunted by the magnitude of the tasks he undertook and haunted by what he termed ‘the red spectre’ of Wagner. His life was cut short in a cycling accident in 1899, at a time when he had only recently achieved some measure of creative fulfilment. Most notably he had managed to turn his own weaknesses into strengths; feeling at sea in the larger-scale genres that he tackled, he invented, perhaps inadvertently, strikingly original forms for his more compact works. His most famous co
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By Vincent P. Skowronski
Amédée Ernest Chausson (1855–99), composer extraordinaire, appears to have been a man mercifully afflicted by the elusive idea that less is more. I learned this in the early 1960s as a newly matriculated violin student at university when I first was introduced to Chausson and his phantasmagoric Poème for violin and orchestra, Op. 25. I had already been apprised of Poème’s many attractive qualities, but one afternoon I decided casually to inquire of my violin teacher-to-be about the prospects for learning and ultimately performing Poème at some point during my college career.
I don’t recall his exact response, but I do remember the word anathema blasting a hole through my skull while he informed me that Chausson’s Poème was not on the list for our violin department’s required repertoire. For years, nary a mention of that incident found its way to the “for further discussion” box relative to my and Monsieur Chausson’s beloved Poème.
So be it.
Still, I did promise myself that, at some point, I would create a gaping hole in space from which I could m
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Ernest Chausson
French composer (1855–1899)
Amédée-Ernest Chausson (French:[ʃosɔ̃]; 20 January 1855 – 10 June 1899) was a French Romanticcomposer.
Life
Born in Paris into an affluent bourgeois family, Chausson was the sole surviving child of a building contractor who made his fortune assisting Baron Haussmann in the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s. To please his father, Chausson studied law and was appointed a barrister for the Court of Appeals, but had little or no interest in the profession. He frequented the Paris salons, where he met celebrities such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon, and Vincent d'Indy. Before deciding on a musical career, he dabbled in writing and drawing.
In 1879, at the age of 24, he began attending the composition classes of Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire; Massenet came to regard him as "an exceptional person and a true artist". He had already composed some piano pieces and songs. Nevertheless, the earliest manuscripts that have been preserved are those corrected by Massenet. At the Conservatoire, Chausson
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