Ernest Chausson

Law occupied Ernest Chausson into his mid-twenties — a doctorate, admission to the bar — before he decided that music was the serious business. He studied with Massenet at the Conservatoire and then attached himself to César Franck, whose music influenced his own. His works include the Symphony in B flat, the Concert for violin, piano and string quartet, the song cycle Poème de l'amour et de la mer, and the Poème for violin and orchestra written for Ysaÿe. As secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique he helped to arrange performances of new French music, and his Paris house became a meeting ground for painters, writers and musicians, Debussy among them. He died in 1899, at forty-four, in a cycling accident. Some forty opus numbers make up the whole, most of them vocal and chamber music. Among those who came to the Paris house were Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré and Isaac Albéniz, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the novelist Ivan Turgenev and the painter Claude Monet, and beyond the orchestral and vocal works he left the symphonic poem Viviane and the lyric drama Le Roi Arthus.