By the mid-1870s, the newly married d'Indy, Henri Duparc, and d'Indy's boyhood friend, poet Robert de Bonnières, were ensconced in a Paris apartment house at 7 avenue de Villars where, at Bonnières' salon one might meet Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, or Leconte de Lisle -- among other literary luminaries -- while Duparc hosted such up-and-coming musicians as Fauré, Messager, Chabrier, and de Bréville. A decade on -- probably in 1887 -- Bonnières' salon began to be frequented by a taciturn Conservatoire student, son of the influential editor of Le Figaro, nursing a passionate attachment to Madame de Bonnières that may be traced musically in two songs marking the beginning and end of it. "À Elle," collected as the first of the Six Poèmes en musique, Op. 3, published in 1891, was composed in the autumn of 1887 and first heard at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on March 31, 1888. It was at this epoch that d'Indy met Albéric Magnardchez the Bonnières and discovered that they had much in common. Both had lost mothers early -- Magnard's at age 4, d'Indy's in childbirth. Both found a friend in Guy Ropartz, who had introduced Magnard into the d'Indy/Duparc/Bonnières circle. Both entertained the highest artistic ideals. And both were ardent Wagnerians. "À Elle" is preceded by a quotation from Die Walküre that the stormy, heavy-breathing piano accompaniment recalls, spiriting up a hurricane of the heart far out of proportion to Magnard's own slender verse conceit -- a quatrain depicting the tempest, another announcing a passion-spent lull, and a final stanza pronouncing a benediction upon the beloved as "Vierge de beauté, de bonté." Dissatisfied with the Conservatoire, Magnard asked the older, already famous d'Indy for composition lessons in the autumn of 1888, which began forthwith and were to stretch over the next four years. "À Henriette," to a poem again by Magnard -- "Henriette ma blonde aux yeux de turquoise..." -- was composed at the end of 1890 or the beginning of 1891, and, while exhibiting greater control, is suffused with Tristan-esque chromaticism as a giddy blazon of sensual yearning. Magnard would meet his future wife, Julia Creton, in December 1891, thus ending his fervent, if platonic, attachment. His biographer, Gaston Carraud, has described Madame de Bonnières as the "type spirituel de la coquette littéraire à la mode...." She was painted in 1889 by Renoir. Though published in Figaro Musical in January 1892, "À Henriette" was publicly performed only at a Magnard memorial concert on May 3, 1919. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
