The French composer Henri Duparc, born in 1848, planned to connect his life with jurisprudence as a child. He usually destroyed his early work when dissatisfied with aspects of his style or with the work itself. In 1868 Henri Duparc’s Five Melodies for voice and piano was published, his first primary surviving collection of songs (Raynaldy and Le Roux 117). Shortly after that, he expressed reservations about three of them, including Le Gallop, although he ultimately allowed them to survive. Henri Duparc spent most of his later life in Switzerland and died in France in 1933.
Le Galop was composed in a romantic style for an instrumental voice and performed on the piano. The composition was recorded in the poem of Sully-Prudhomme, written in 1865 (Raynaldy and Le Roux 117). Like contemporary musicians, Henri Duparc responds to the call of the times: to reconcile melody and speech so that the difference between the free speech of music and the syntactic and meaningful speech of verbal language disappears. The poet and the composer were inspired to create this work by fast horseback riding. From listening to the composition, there is a feeling of merging humans and nature, the present and the infinite.
The composition is famous; many singers with piano accompaniment performed it. Thomas Allen performed Le Galop in a baritone with accompaniment by Roger Vignoles. The mixed method allows the listeners to immerse themselves in the sound and creates the necessary atmosphere. Paul Groves, also accompanied by Vignoles, performs the composition in tenor, using the twang technique, enhancing the impression. Andrea Mastoni, accompanied by Mattia Ometto, sings in the bass, using the possibilities of belting, creating a feeling of freedom from horseback riding.
All three performances seem to be successful, but against the background of the rest, the even tone of Thomas Allen wins. The piano part is quite rich and exciting in itself and, to some extent, independent; it can even be played without regard to the voice. This composition was written for solo piano with vocal accompaniment. The singer uses all the possibilities of the tenor to create the necessary accents allowing the listener to feel the free running of the horse and the emotions of the merging of the human with the natural.
Work Cited
Raynaldy, Romain, and Le Roux, Francois. Le Chant Intime: The Interpretation of French Mélodie. United States, Oxford University Press, 2021.