By Rex Burgess
When one looks at a chronological list of French composers one cannot fail to be impressed by the number of those born in the final quarter of the nineteenth century: 27 in all. Among the more enduring names are Ravel, Aubert, Canteloube, Le Flem, Varèse, Dupré, Tailleferre, Lili Boulanger, Ibert, all of Les Six and, not least among them, André Caplet.
The youngest of seven children, Caplet was born in Le Havre in 1878 to a family of modest means, resulting in him starting life, as one writer puts it, ‘with a necessity for resourcefulness and self-reliance: attributes that would eventually shape his identity as a composer, musician and friend.’
By the age of 12 Caplet, who received his early musical training in Le Havre, had already started supporting himself by working as a rehearsal pianist and later as a violinist in an orchestra in his hometown, where he was praised for his trained ear and sight-reading prowess.
Upon moving to Paris in 1896 he entered the Conservatoire, studying harmony, fugue, composition and accompaniment and going on to win several prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1901, when his cantata Myrrha narrowly edged out a work by Ravel. Maintaining himself at first by playing in dance orchestras, he soon embarked on conducting and such were his talents that in 1899, after a stint as assistant conductor of the Orchestre Colonne, he was appointed musical director at the Paris Théâtre de l’Odéon.
In 1905, after spending some time in Rome, Caplet returned to Paris where he pursued his conducting career and continued to compose. He spent four seasons conducting the Boston Opera Company from 1910 until the outbreak of World War I, when he enlisted and saw combat in the trenches at Verdun. Towards the end of the war and continuing into 1919 he taught conducting, harmony and orchestration at the music school established by the prominent American conductor and composer Walter Damrosch. The aim of the school was to train US military personnel in music in the hope of creating military bands on the model of those found in France. Caplet then gave up both teaching and conducting, concentrating solely on composing until a cold that turned into pleurisy led to his death on 22 April 1925.
Caplet had many friends, one of them Claude Debussy, who held him in high esteem both personally and as a musician. In a letter to the music critic Georges-Jean Aubry, Debussy wrote: ‘This Caplet is an artist. He knows how to find a sonorous atmosphere and, with an attractive sensitiveness, has a sense of proportion; something which is rarer than one would believe in our haphazard musical epoch patched or closed like a cork!’ Caplet helped Debussy orchestrate several of his works, including parts of the opera Pelléas and Mélisande, the cantata The Prodigal Son and the symphonic fragments for the regrettably incomplete Martyrdom of Saint Sébastien.
It seems that Caplet composed very little, although those works that exist are all high quality. In the pre-war years he wrote mainly songs and other vocal works, along with a number of orchestral and chamber pieces, of which the most notable is his atmospheric setting of Poe’s The Masque of the Black Death. After the war he concentrated primarily on writing religious works. Idiomatically forward-looking, it can reasonably be suggested that Caplet forms an essential link between the pre-1900 Impressionists, and the subsequent generation of modernist composers represented by Sauget, Duruflé, Jolivet, Messiaen and others.
Listeners can hear a selection of Caplet’s works in Sunday Special at 3pm on Sunday 27 April.