Charles-Valentin Alkan’s hymn for solo voice
Paix à la paix was discovered by musicologist Hugh Macdonald. An account of his discovery can be found in the Alkan Society Bulletin no 90 (January 2014), pp 5-6 (available online at http://www.alkansociety.org/Publications/Society-Bulletins/society-bulletins.html). In brief, Macdonald found the autograph manuscript en passant while searching for a hymn by Georges Bizet in an uncatalogued box in the French
Archives Nationales. Both Bizet’s and Alkan’s pieces were written for a competition for an anthem to be sung at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. The brief was to set a text either by Gustave Choquet or François Coppée, for solo voice or massed voices - presumably a performance
en plein air was envisaged (for further information on the competition and Coppée’s text, see Cheyronnaud 2011, referenced below).
As noted by the Alkan Society Bulletin, ‘It may be that it was felt the strains of the
Marseillaise was thought to be rather sanguinary for an event dedicated to the cooperation of nations, particularly at a time when international tensions were running relatively high—the Franco-Prussian War was to take place in 1870’ (5). Accordingly Coppée’s text is a hymn to peace, to which Alkan, with his internationalist, spiritual and anti-militaristic sentiments, would naturally have been drawn. Best known for his virtuosic piano compositions, by the 1860s Alkan had become more introspective, focussing on lyrical and spiritual themes as in the third and fourth volumes of his
Chants (songs without words) for piano, and the organ cycles
13 Prières and
11 Pièces dans le style religieux, all of which appeared in the years around 1867. Paix à la paix fits in to this context, and offers a striking and distinctive unaccompanied vocal solo to add to Alkan’s modest corpus of vocal compositions. The hymn employs a rousing anthemic musical topic, whose sources seem to include the grand opera manner of Meyerbeer and the ‘public’ style of Berlioz’s more massive works.
Neither Alkan’s nor Bizet’s entries were awarded a prize, which was in fact withheld due to the competition judges’ view that while ‘a few revealed some real merit in composition... they did not meet the proposed conditions’ (Alkan Society Bulletin 2014: 6).
Paix à la paix therefore languished unnoticed in the archive for the century and a half until Macdonald’s discovery. The likely premiere, as reported in the Alkan Society Bulletin, was in Florence’s Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in November 2013 (the year of its composer’s bicentenary).
- ISMN: 9790570684564 (M570684564)
