Henri Duparc’s output is exiguous: no more than seventeen songs survive, but on them rests his reputation as one of the greatest composers in the history of the mélodie. They were composed between the ages of twenty and thirty-seven, after which he lived for another forty-eight years without publishing—and hardly writing—another note. Unlike Fauré, three years his senior, who by the age of twenty had already produced a fair corpus of juvenile songs, Duparc’s first mélodies, from ‘Chanson triste’ on, reveal his fully developed genius. La fuite (1871) sets a poem by Théophile Gautier and takes the form of a duet between Kadidja and Ahmed. The girl suggests to her lover that they should elope together, and when he proves faint-hearted, she assures him that her eyelashes will shade him from the sun and, if there’s no water along the route, they will drink the tears of her joy. There is also a setting by Bizet.

from notes by Richard Stokes © 2016