A Romantic writer who won praise from none other than the redoubtable critic Charles Sainte-Beuve for her poetry, Augustine-Malvina Blanchecotte creates in La chère blessure the psychological portrayal of remorse and guilt that are actually cherished because they impel the persona back to a lover he or she once mistreated. For such dark complexities of the human heart, Reynaldo Hahn concocts wonderfully brooding, dissonance-laden harmonies against which the voice mostly murmurs on repeated pitches. When the persona sings of ripping ‘your name’ out of her heart in the past, the vault upwards at ‘arraché’ (plucked, torn, ripped) is all the more intense in the wake of the chanting that precedes it.

from notes by Susan Youens © 2015