Lekeu, Magnard

With a single bow, two elegies

As a prologue: August 1889, Bayreuth...

...on the “green hill” where the Festspielhaus stands, completed fifteen years ago according to Richard Wagner's wishes, two composers meet. Like so many others in a Europe gripped by a violent Wagnerian fever, they made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to attend performances of Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A mutual friend introduced them: Théodore de Wyzewa, one of the leading lights of Parisian intellectual life, writer, and founder of the famous Revue wagnérienne. The two young men were Guillaume Lekeu and Albéric Magnard, aged nineteen and twenty-four. And the former's opinion of the latter was not lacking in frankness: “I was introduced to Vincent d'Indy's only pupil, Magnard. He did not make a good impression on me. I saw him as neither a musician nor an artist, at least in everything I heard him say, and he seems to be, above all, a very sharp mind, very Parisian and boulevardier, a prodigious quality perhaps, but one that is of no use to anyone who wants to deal with serious matters. Besides, I think I made a sad impression on him. I think I am not very sociable, which is disgusting.”

Far from being coincidental, this meeting in Bayreuth was indicative of the debates that were raging in musical circles at the time. One question summed them all up: for or against Wagner? Massenet made the trip to reassure himself that he was right not to succumb to the spell of the “old Klingsor,” while d'Indy came to commune with the grandeur of the lyric drama—and both, as Magnard recounts, exchanged hypocritical courtesies between sarcastic remarks. Such were the petty affairs of Parisian musical life as seen from Bayreuth. Lekeu and Magnard, for their part, immersed themselves in Wagner's work, which would become a key part of their legacy. We know almost nothing about the relationship they maintained after their first meeting, but that matters little: the important thing is that they were already taking a stand in artistic circles. Among the thousand paths open to them, their paths would not be without common ground...

• Guillaume Lekeu, Sonata in G
• Albéric Magnard, Sonata opus 13

With Irina Muresanu (violin)