Poème

There are few more sensuously romantic works in the violin repertoire than Chausson’s Poème. Written in 1896 for the great Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe, it received its first performance in Nancy in December of the same year. Ysaÿe had initially asked Chausson to write him a full-length violin concerto. But the composer had other ideas, deciding that an extended one-movement work was better suited to his own talents. The initial inspiration for the Poème derives from Chausson’s admiration for a short novel by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev titled The Song of Triumphant Love about the unrequited passion of a young musician for a beautiful singer. Whether Chausson followed the emotional trajectory of Turgenev’s novel in his Poème remains an open question. But there is no doubt that this rhapsodic work projects great intensity and passion. It opens with darkly scored textures and yearning harmonies in the lower registers of the orchestra. The violin enters unaccompanied playing a tender folklike melody, which is then repeated by the orchestra underpinned by rich harmonies. After a further extended virtuosic passage for unaccompanied violin, the music becomes increasingly animated, eventually building to a powerful climax. But the passion soon abates, and in the final bars, the violin soars to its highest register, playing a sequence of spellbindingly magical trills.