Chausson was inspired to write "Poème" after reading a short story by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), entitled "The Song of Triumphant Love."
The power and emotional aura of Chausson’s music take first-timers by surprise. He wrote a few searching songs, a handful of prized chamber pieces, the most individual symphony in the French tradition, an epic and mystical opera about King Arthur, and a Poème for violin which, thanks to the career needs of virtuosos, is almost well known. Here is another Poème, both symphonic and sung. Expect the overwhelming and you won’t be disappointed.
Franck his mentor, Wagner his guiding light, Debussy his fellow traveller. There is a decadent air about much of this art, and a colleague said Chausson had ‘the appearance of rising from the middle of a dream and taking a step towards real life’.
Chausson used Maurice Bouchor’s poems and evokes scents and the colours of lilac and rose and seeks to universalise one experience of love’s blossoming and decay.
Two long poems are separated by an interlude, though the final part of ‘La mort de l’amour’, in returning to the music of the interlude, sounds like an epilogue and has been published independently (under the title Le temps des lilas). Chausson’s sea-music is Wagnerian, and his favourite chord, which he often used elsewhere, is related to the famous ambivalent chord at the beginning of Tristan und Isolde.
Chausson took many years to write the Poème de l’amour et de la mer, from 1882 to 1890, and after the premieres in early 1893 – with piano in Brussels, with orchestra in Paris – he revised it yet again.