Stephen Rumph, Wagner and the French Song Cycle

The song cycle arrived late in France, long after Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’étés (1841) and Félicien David’s Les perles d’Orient (1846) are loose collections, without obvious narratives, key schemes or thematic recollections, and no further examples appeared for twenty years. Jules Massenet’s Poème d’avril (1866) is the first French song cycle in the familiar sense, with a coherent narrative and recurring themes. The genre surged to life in around 1890, however, and thereafter Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Ernest Chausson, Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc published almost all their songs in cycles, with varying degrees of poetic and musical cohesion.