Reynaldo Hahn (August 9, 1874 – January 28, 1947) was a Venezuelan, naturalized French, composer, conductor, music critic, diarist, theater director, and salon singer. Best known as a composer of more than 100 songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie.
He was close friends with Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt amongst many others.
Piano Concerto in E major (1930)
Dedication: à Magda Tagliaferro
1. Improvisation: Modéré très liberement (0:00)
2. Danse: Vif (12:12)
3. Rêverie (15:02), Toccata (23:00) et Finale
Angelyne Pondepeyre, piano and Orchestre National de Lorraine conducted by Fernand Quatrocchi
Graham Johnson writes that Hahn "was never truly of the twentieth century"; he was for many years regarded chiefly as evoking the spirit of fin de siècle Paris. He was not in sympathy with the more obviously modern music of the early decades of the 20th century, but he moved with the times. According to a 2020 analysis:
Trained in the canons of Late Romanticism by his mentor and patron Jules Massenet, he succeeded in adjusting his style to the modernity of the Années folles, composing musical comedies with echoes of jazz, foxtrot and Argentinian tango, making masterly use of the saxophone and the piano in his orchestra … a catalogue of compositions ranging from chamber music – the sublime Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet – to ballet and the orchestral repertory.
Hahn's biographer Jacques Depaulis writing in 2006, comments that many composers suffer a period of neglect after their deaths and are then rediscovered, a process known in France as "la traversée du désert" – crossing the desert. In 1947 a British newspaper remarked that Hahn "is hardly remembered today outside the boundaries of France". In 1961, 14 years after the composer's death, the musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt dismissed Hahn as "a talented gossip who had a gift for grinding out operettas and little, tastefully performed ballads in limitless quantities". In the last decades of the 20th century there was a revival in interest in Hahn's music: Johnson (2002) refers to "an ever-widening range of his mélodies to be heard regularly on the concert platform".
