Ernest Chausson

If Marcel Proust had written music, it might have sounded something like Ernest Chausson's: intensely passionate, yet rarely given to grand gestures. The effectiveness of Chausson's ardent, even erotic, musical language derives largely from the slithery chromatic style the composer inherited from his most important teacher, César Franck. Indeed, Chausson's music forms an elegant, if swaying, bridge between Franck's lush, Wagnerian Romanticism and the sensuous Impressionist language of Debussy. Chausson came from a well-to-do family; in fact, comfortable circumstances through...