Self-critical and pessimistic, the late nineteenth-century French composer Ernest Chausson wrote beautiful songs before his early death in a freak bicycle accident. Le temps des lilas is perhaps Chausson’s most famous song, the essence of nostalgia for all that slips away from us as time goes by. The writer Camille Mauclair once described Chausson as having the appearance of someone ‘rising from mid-dream and taking a step towards reality … he was one of those who concern themselves their entire lives with their inner existence’, and we hear in this song a pattern typical of this composer: a beginning in elegiac melancholy, anguish and turbulence in the middle section, and a return to opening strains now made even more haunting at the close.

from notes by Susan Youens © 2015