A LOVE REVIVED

Violinist Philippe Graffin has recorded a work for violin and orchestra by Eugène Ysaÿe that had lain undiscovered for more than a century. He speaks to Jessica Duchen about the love affair that inspired the piece, and what can be learnt from its discovery

Théo van Rysselberghe’s 1894 portrait of violinist Irma Sèthe

ASSOCIATION DES AMIS DU PETIT PALAIS, GENEVA; PHOTO STUDIO MONIQUE BERNAZ, GENEVA

The story is astonishing: an unknown work for violin and orchestra by Eugène Ysaÿe, found, orchestrated and recorded for the first time more than a century after its composition. Its name: Poème concertant. Its inspiration: a passionate relationship between the composer and one of his ex-pupils, Irma Sèthe, herself an exceptionally gifted violinist. And alongside its recording is the first full-length recording of the composer’s earlier Violin Concerto in E minor.

It looks like a project that was simply waiting for Philippe Graffin to come along. The French violinist and professor has such a reputation as musical sleuth that he might soon need a TV drama series to himself. Where Ysaÿe is concerned, Graffin discovered a seventh solo violin sonata to add to the famous six; it was the topic of a documentary he made in 2019–20, Ysaÿe’s Secret Sonata, and also features on his recital recording Fiddler’s Blues. Before that, he sought out and recorded the original pre-Kreisler version of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, and twenty years ago he dug out, then recorded in South Africa, the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, long before it became fashionable. For his latest Ysaÿe adventure, he has worked with the musicologist Xavier Falques on resuscitating this revelatory music.

I’m meeting Graffin in a place Ysaÿe himself would have known and where he might have met his friends when arriving from Brussels: the brasserie Terminus Nord, opposite the Gare du Nord in Paris. Graffin has settled in the French capital after a twenty-year spell in London and holds teaching posts at both the Paris Conservatoire and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Ysaÿe, Belgium’s most celebrated violinist, was effectively his musical grandfather, as Graffin studied at the University of Indiana’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, with an Ysaÿe student and inheritor of his radically expressive approach to violinistic sound and colour.

Ysaÿe himself was a larger-than-life personality in every sense. The conductor Henry Wood noted of him: ‘The quality of tone was ravishingly beautiful… He seemed to get more colour out of a violin than any of his contemporaries.’ He was blessed with a red-hot tone that reflected a seemingly limitless imagination, and had a generosity of spirit that led him to start a summer school on the Belgian coast at Knokke where his students could play day and night. He had been a student of Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps, and early on impressed Clara Schumann and Joachim, as well as Rubinstein, who effectively ‘discovered’ him.

Even without works of his own, he would have transformed the repertoire for solo violin single-handedly just by inspiring others. He is the dedicatee of such masterpieces as the Franck Violin Sonata (a wedding present from the composer), Chausson’s Poème and Concert and the Lekeu Sonata. He and his string quartet were profoundly influential: Debussy wrote his sole quartet for them, and Fauré his Piano Quintet no.1. The Ysaÿe Quartet premiered both, the second in 1906 with Fauré himself at the piano.

As a composer, however, Ysaÿe has been more elusive. ‘All my life I’d lived with the idea that Ysaÿe tried to write violin concertos in his youth, then gave up around the time he commissioned the Chausson Poème,’ says Graffin. ‘So there was the Poème élégiaque in 1892, the commissioning of the Chausson in 1893 and then he only wrote poèmes of his own, publishing seven of them. It’s turned out that that is not quite right.’

The only extant work for violin and orchestra by Ysaÿe with three movements is the Violin Concerto in E minor (1884–5), which was left incomplete. Falques, who recreated the finale (based on the second one that Ysaÿe composed for the concerto) writes: ‘Correspondence and sketches provide glimpses of a lengthy process of reflection and revision aimed at bringing this work to fruition.’ But perhaps one reason that the E minor Concerto was unfinished was that Ysaÿe wished to explore a whole new direction instead. ‘I believe that the virtuoso violin concerto, like those by his teachers Vieuxtemps or Wieniawski, did not appeal to him any more,’ Graffin says. ‘He imagined and invented a more poetic, free, narrative and intimate role for the soloist.’

Eugène Ysaÿe in 1883

YSAŸE PHOTO ROYAL LIBRARY OF BELGIUM. GRAFFIN PHOTO MARIE VAN DER BERG

Violinist Philippe Graffin is a grand-pupil of Ysaÿe through Josef Gingold

YSAŸE WAS BLESSED WITH A RED-HOT TONE THAT REFLECTED A SEEMINGLY LIMITLESS IMAGINATION

The image of Irma Sèthe is best known from the artist Théo van Rysselberghe’s 1894 elegant pointillist portrait of her playing the violin (with a seated figure in the background suggesting the presence of her sister). It shows a young woman of great poise and character: a quizzical, direct, intelligent gaze and a sense of being at ease, even at one, with her violin and bow. A photograph of her by Adolphe Hamesse, displaying an altogether more modern style of dress, confirms the authenticity of that gaze. In 1906 the Musical Times reviewed a well-attended concert that she gave at London’s Bechstein Hall (today Wigmore Hall): ‘This lady is a violinist of the first rank, reflecting in notable manner the style of her teacher, M. Ysaÿe… Mme Sèthe played with convincing expression and power.’

A former child prodigy, Sèthe was about 18 years old when Ysaÿe, who had once been her teacher, fell head over heels in love with her (it was common in those days for women to marry and start families at 18 or younger). At the time (from which the Van Rysselberghe painting dates), he was a married man of 35 and the relationship was evidently doomed from the start. ‘He could not resist his passion,’ Graffin says, ‘and he imposed this other relationship on his wife for a while. Then he tried to write a concerto for Sèthe, a concerto in G minor. A letter from him, written in 1894, exists in which he explains what the themes are, with a central core theme of despair. This is something very rare to have for an unknown piece of music. We also discover that the work was to be 25 minutes long, and at the end of the letter, which itself is very beautiful, he speaks of “this concert piece – which is rather a ‘poëme’.”’

Eventually Ysaÿe, his situation untenable, broke off with Sèthe, though they remained on correspondence terms. Several years later she married the Russian philosopher, journalist, writer and diplomat Samuel Saenger and moved with him to Berlin, where they raised two daughters. Unlike many female musicians of the time, however, she never relinquished her career.

‘I BELIEVE THAT THE VIRTUOSO VIOLIN CONCERTO DID NOT APPEAL TO YSAŸE ANY MORE. HE INVENTED A MORE POETIC, FREE, NARRATIVE AND INTIMATE ROLE FOR THE SOLOIST’

Photograph of the young Irma Sèthe by Adolphe Hamesse

She continued performing – in everything from solo recitals to the Berlin Philharmonic – and teaching until late in her life. The couple were able to leave Germany just in time before the outbreak of the Second World War, moving first to Paris and then the US. Sèthe died in New York in 1958.

Ysaÿe began writing the G minor work that was to become the Poème concertant in 1893 – at the Sèthe family home. Then he reworked it, again and again. Falques writes that rather than losing power or conviction after the relationship with Sèthe ended, ‘The work, on the contrary, takes on a new dimension that imparts an extra soul to the notes.’ Hearing Sèthe play this ‘concert work’, Ysaÿe wrote to her that it ‘tells the passionate drama that is unfolding here at this hour – this music in which there is a sense of insatiability, where one seems to be chasing after something that never arrives… I know that no other work I write will express this bitter chapter of our existence better than this one!’

‘He kept working on it for 18 years,’ says Josef Gingold Graffin. ‘Every time he had to write out the entire score again, so there are various different manuscripts, each becoming more elaborate. But it’s a “forbidden” piece. The whole family knew the story behind it, and in fact Mr Gingold told me about Irma Sèthe.

So that was the big passion of Ysaÿe’s early life.’

Even if the work remained off limits and unpublished, Graffin says, ‘Ysaÿe never gave up on this piece, and that’s why I think he never gave up on the idea of writing a concerto, because there are sketches for a third movement for it.’ (There is no evidence of a second movement, however.) The music outlived the passionate emotions that inspired it and gradually acquired a life of its own: ‘He changed the dedication, inscribing it to his best friend. But while it was a concerto for reference, he refers to it in letters as “Poème concertant”.’ Graffin says.

Josef Gingold

Pages 5 and 6 of an undated letter from Ysaÿe to Irma Sèthe, which includes musical motifs for what was to become the Poème concertant

KBR MUSIC DIVISIONS

Graffin’s long-standing fascination with Ysaÿe started with the legendary Belgian’s string quartet and friendship with Debussy. ‘I approach Ysaÿe’s solo sonatas as if they are the violin equivalent of Debussy’s short piano pieces,’ he says. ‘I think they are often played by violinists as virtuoso works when in fact they are very impressionistic.’ Their virtuosity is simply not the point, he suggests. ‘Ysaÿe’s motto was: “Ne jamais rien faire qui n’ai pour buts et moyens l’émotion, la poésie, le coeur” [‘Never do anything that does not have emotion, poetry, the heart as its goals’]. The phrase appears on a memorial urn in the Ysaÿe Museum in Liège. The sonatas seem to speak of Bach, Chopin and a vast repertoire – for violinists they are a voyage into a larger world. Thanks to Mr Gingold, I could see through this music the ways that the violin could be expressive.’

Every student of Gingold, Graffin suggests, would have come away with an individual impression of Ysaÿe’s heritage. ‘Mr Gingold had very specific things to say about what Ysaÿe did in this passage or that, in every piece that was “his” – like the Franck Sonata or the Chausson Poème. We all knew those stories. But the most important thing was that you’d come into the room and Mr Gingold, who would have his violin in his hands, would play something, you would play something, and then he would show you how much more expressive it could be. He had an incredible way of doing things within the notes and in between the notes; and his sense of rubato was very influenced by Ysaÿe, taking time and making up for it. In that sense, we had more than a glimpse of Ysaÿe. For us, Ysaÿe is a myth, but for Mr Gingold he was a real person. He spent two and a half years with him, and he used to say, “I can see him as I can see you.” For me, the impression that remains is the means of expression, especially the colours he could create with the left hand and the bow.’

‘FOR MR GINGOLD, YSAŸE WAS A REAL PERSON. HE USED TO SAY, “I CAN SEE HIM AS I CAN SEE YOU”’

Graffin recording the Poème concertant with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Jean-Jacques Kantorow

SESSION PHOTO BRUNO MAES. GROUP PHOTO COURTESY OF ERIKA VEGA

‘ THERE IS NO QUESTION OF RECOMPOSITION. WE MADE SURE NOT TO WRITE A SINGLE NOTE THAT WAS NOT YSAŸE’S OWN’

Philippe Graffin, conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow and composer Erika Vega at the recording sessions

One example is his approach to vibrato, which Graffin identifies as profoundly influential: ‘Ysaÿe was arguably one of the first violinists to use vibrato. The teacher of Ginette Neveu, the violinist Jules Boucherit, wrote in his memoirs that in the 1890s, when Ysaÿe was beginning his career, Pablo Sarasate was reaching the end of his, and that the difference between them was that one was using vibrato and the other wasn’t.’

Graffin points to recordings that Ysaÿe made as early as 1912, and the violinist’s determination to push the boundaries: ‘A special machine was made for him on which he could record for as long as five minutes,’ he says. ‘That’s why his recordings were slightly longer than anybody else’s at the time.’ They do sound extraordinarily clear and vivid, given that they are around 111 years old: ‘Now I listen to them as if he’s in the next room. He was almost the musical narrator of his times. I got into the Debussy Quartet, the Fauré First Quintet and the Chausson Poème because of him, because I think they were written as they were because of his violinistic abilities and musical skill: he could create colours, he could vibrate and he gave the composers a different “instrument” to work with. After that, through the sonatas I found him as a composer in his own right: not just a violinist who also writes, but a real artist.’

Graffin continues: ‘What fascinates me about the Poème concertant is that it’s a forbidden piece that is actually very rich. Xavier Falques worked for seven years on it, putting all the information from the various manuscripts into a final one for violin and piano. But there are so many passages for orchestra alone that finally I decided to have it orchestrated fully, as it would have been in Ysaÿe’s time. I commissioned my friend, the Mexican composer Erika Vega, to do it. Xavier, meanwhile, studied the orchestration of Ysaÿe further, orchestrated the finale of the concerto in E minor, and advised Erika. I asked Xavier also to make a chamber version with string quartet and piano, like the instrumentation of the Chausson Concert.’

Graffin is partnered in the new recording (on the Avie label) by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jean-Jacques Kantorow. The sum total of vast amounts of work, it represents a huge achievement. ‘We primarily reconstructed the orchestration based on the annotations left by Ysaÿe in his manuscripts,’ Falques writes. ‘There is no question of recomposition; instead, we aimed to rediscover Ysaÿe’s orchestral approach and that of his mentors. Consequently, we made sure not to write a single note that was not Ysaÿe’s own.’

And for the future? Will we be hearing more of the Poème concertant? Graffin is giving the world premiere performance of the new chamber version, alongside the Chausson Concert, during the 2024 Belgian Music Days at the Royal Conservatory, Brussels. Appropriately enough, it is on Valentine’s Day. ‘Whether it will ultimately find a place in the repertoire alongside Ysaÿe’s more famous pieces, I don’t know,’ Graffin says. ‘But it is a great work and it can hold its own.’

Special thanks to Xavier Falques and to Marie Cornaz, curator of the music division at the Royal Library of Belgium. Philippe Graffin’s new album Rêves is released on 9 February