Throughout October and November I listened to Reynaldo Hahn's "À Chloris." It's stunning, in obvious ways — its beauty is patient and quiet but not subtle — lush, lush late Romantic, clear, pure, flowing (voice), and at the same time rich, weighed down (piano). It combines extreme tenderness with a sense of plodding toward the gallows — plodding but with little syncopations and grace notes. The left hand plays a melody of Bach's, which has a bracing effect on the melting lushness. But I try not to listen to the left hand — I like to hear its line as a vague tugging, an unplaceable magnet, rather than as an explicit melody.

Associations it sparks:

1. Bach

2. Hahn was Proust's lifelong companion. But I still haven't read Proust, so this doesn't mean much to me.

3. The words are by Théophile de Viau, whom Thomas Stanley translated and Andrew Marvell read. It may be that the names of shepherds and shepherdesses in pastoral poetry mean little (though I'm sure there are exceptions, like Thestylis in "Upon Appleton House"), but I can't help thinking of Marvell's "Damon and Chlorinda."


Here are the words:

S’il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m’aimes,
Mais j’entends, que tu m’aimes bien,
Je ne crois point que les rois mêmes
Aient un bonheur pareil au mien.
Que la mort serait importune
De venir changer ma fortune
A la félicité des cieux!
Tout ce qu’on dit de l’ambroisie
Ne touche point ma fantaisie
Au prix des grâces de tes yeux.

Jan Swafford's wonderful biography of Brahms had a lot on Brahms's debt to baroque and rococo.
Here's Hazlitt quoting Beaumont & Fletcher:

Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favorites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:

'—Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a God,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a scepter, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!'

A passage like this indeed leaves a taste on the palate like nectar, and we seem in reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables: but if we repeat it often in ordinary moods, it loses its flavour, becomes vapid, 'the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees remain.'

-from 'On the Pleasure Hating'