On 2 February 1889 the Société nationale de musique hosted its one hundred and ninetieth concert. On the programme were Fauré's Second Piano Quartet, incidental music by Chausson for La tempête, a string quintet by Lucien Lambert, extracts from a quartet by Charles Lefebvre, and piano pieces by Paul Fournier. There was also a handful of songs, all receiving first performances: Chausson's Sérénade (op. 13, no. 2), Fauré's Au cimetière (op. 51, no. 2), and two songs from a newly published collection of Ariettes by SNM debutant Claude Debussy. One tenor premiered all four songs: Maurice Bagès Jacobé de Trigny.

1889 arguably marks another inflection point in French musical history: the crest of the ‘second wave’ of wagnérisme. This chapter follows mélodie through the backwash of that wave, tracing the musical and social interactions that led towards, and away from, that SNM concert. Maurice Bagès stands at the centre of this chapter and the two that follow, for his remarkable career was built upon a vertigo-inducing combination of contemporary mélodie and Wagnerian opera. The first part of the chapter continues the narrative of creative fellowship begun in Part 1, exploring the legacy, in song, of musicians’ pilgrimages to Bayreuth. As chapter 4 has already suggested, those journeys did not just inform compositional thinking: still more did they spark and nurture relationships that became in themselves a generative force. The latter part of the chapter shifts the focus to the composers who—even as they marvelled at Bayreuth—were wrestling simultaneously with the weight of wagnérisme, and the meaning and function of song. In this time of hesitation, frustration, and experimentation, it was Bagès to whom they frequently turned, finding in him a performer who could restore their faltering confidence in the possibilities of the mélodie. Moving from Fauré to Chabrier and Chausson, the chapter concludes by returning us once more to Baudelaire, and a song composed in the weeks immediately preceding that remarkable concert of February 1889: Debussy's ‘Harmonie du soir’.

‘I love them all and sing them all.’

Little is traced of Maurice Bagès's early life. He was born in 1862 into a military family (his father was a quartermaster), moving over the course of his childhood from Strasbourg to Châlons-en-Champagne and Lyon.