Magnard's oeuvre teeters between "pure" music and a need to work out characterological preoccupations -- -the Symphony No. 1 (1890), an apprentice's demonstration of professional competence, for instance, is followed by the single-act opera Yolande (1891), the first harbinger of his peculiar obsession with Woman. That is, not with a woman or women but with femininity in the abstract -- Das ewig Weibliche. Composition of a Second Symphony (1892-1894) overlaps the seven piano Promenades (1893) celebrating -- giddily, ecstatically -- his liaison with Julia Creton, whom he married in 1896. The loss of his mother at age four foreordained him a votary of the Feminine with an intensity that conjugal rapport could only partially assuage. The death of his father at the end of 1894 awakened another host of ambivalent feelings -- -gratitude, anguish, guilt, relief -- -adding one more strand to the psychological knot his work seems dedicated to unraveling. The ghost of Francis Magnard would not be exorcised until Guercoeur (1897-1901), whose eponymous hero is at once Albéric Magnard's self-portrait and an idealization of his father, though the feminine divinities -- Goodness, Suffering, Beauty, and Truth -- ruling the Heaven, or Platonic noösphere, of Guercoeur, and the infinitely consoling quartet he composed for them at the opera's conclusion, hold the key to his vie intérieure. If his best work draws its power transcending the upheaval of inner stresses, curiously, when the purely personal terms of that torque are made explicit, as they are in the confessional Quatre Poèmes (1902), the upshot is conventional (despite the Poèmes' daring form), maudlin, and embarrassing, though they confirm the need to return again and again to the fault line of the family romance. By the time of the Hymne à Vénus, composed over December 1903-April 1904, Magnard was deeply involved in his own family romance -- his daughter Ève was born March 2, 1901, and Julia was pregnant with their second. Dedicated to his wife, the Hymne à Vénus possesses a private significance, though its alternations of ethereality and violence are foretold in Magnard's epigraph -- "Of the delights and frenzies of love born of the rhythm of the universe." As in the Hymne à la justice (1902), despite generous eloquence and arresting ideas, the development does not lead convincingly to the triumphant conclusion, which wears an air of having been impatiently tacked on. Guy Ropartz conducted the premiere at the Salle Poirel, Nancy, on December 4, 1904. The composer did not attend, deeming it sufficient that he had conceived the work. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
