Reynaldo Hahn de Echenagucia (9 August 1874 – 28 January 1947) was a French composer, conductor, music critic, and singer of Venezuelan birth. He is best known for his songs – mélodies – of which he wrote more than 100.
Hahn was born in Caracas but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he lived most of his life there. Following the success of his song "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" (If my verses had wings), written when he was aged 14, he became a prominent member of fin de siècle French society. Among his closest friends were Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust. After the First World War, in which he served in the army, Hahn adapted to new musical and theatrical trends and enjoyed successes with his first opérette, Ciboulette (1923) and a collaboration with Sacha Guitry, the musical comedy Mozart (1926). During the Second World War Hahn, who was of Jewish descent, took refuge in Monaco, returning to Paris in 1945 where he was appointed director of the Opéra. He died in Paris in 1947, aged 72.
Hahn was a prolific composer. His vocal works include secular and sacred pieces, lyric scenes, cantatas, oratorios, operas, comic operas, and operettas. Orchestral works include concertos, ballets, tone poems, incidental music for plays and films. He wrote a range of chamber music, and piano works. He sang as well as played his own songs, and made recordings as a soloist and accompanying other performers.
After his death, his music was largely neglected until the late 20th century, which saw increasing interest and frequent performances of his songs and piano work, as well as much of his orchestral music and some of his stage works.
Reynaldo Hahn de Echenagucia was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on 9 August 1874, the youngest child of Carlos (né Karl) Hahn (1822–1897) and his wife Elena María née de Echenagucia (1831–1912). Carlos Hahn, the eldest son of a Jewish family in Hamburg, emigrated to Venezuela in 1845 at the age of twenty-two, making a highly successful business career there. He converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Elena de Echenagucia; she was of Spanish descent on her father's side and Dutch-English on her mother's. When his friend and associate Antonio Guzmán Blanco became president of the country in 1870, Carlos became Blanco's financial adviser. The Hahns had eleven or twelve children, nine of whom lived to adulthood. Reynaldo, known as "Nano", was the youngest, twenty years younger than his eldest brother. He was brought up speaking fluent German, Spanish and (having a British nanny) English.
When Blanco's first term of office came to an end in 1877, the Hahn family left Venezuela and settled in Paris, where they had relations and well-connected friends. It was France that, as a 21st-century writer put it, would "determine and define Hahn's musical identity in later life". Among the family's Parisian friends was Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I; at a musical soirée in her drawing room, the young Hahn made his public debut as a singer at the age of six. He began composition lessons with an Italian teacher when he was eight.
In 1885, aged eleven, Hahn was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris's preparatory course. He went on to study piano with Émile Decombes, harmony with Albert Lavignac and Théodore Dubois, and composition with Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet. Among his fellow students were Maurice Ravel and Alfred Cortot, as well as the pianist Édouard Risler, with whom he would keep an extensive correspondence. Massenet in particular became Hahn's lifelong friend and mentor. As a young man Massenet had won France's top musical scholarship, the Prix de Rome, but Hahn could not emulate him: only French nationals were eligible, and the Hahns had not taken French citizenship. Besides, Massenet counselled, with rich parents Hahn did not need the scholarship as his less affluent colleagues did. Through Massenet, Hahn met Camille Saint-Saëns, with whom he studied privately in addition to his Conservatoire lessons. Hahn's fellow students
While still a student Hahn had an early success with his mélodie "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" (If my verses had wings) to a poem by Victor Hugo. The song was among a set of Hahn's mélodies published by the leading music publisher Hartmann et Cie in 1890. Le Figaro took it up – "We feel we must reproduce this graceful piece which obviously denotes a delicate and original musician" – and devoted half a broadsheet page to printing the words and music.
Hahn dedicated "Si mes vers avaient des ailes" to his sister Maria, who had married the painter Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta. At their house Hahn met many of the leading figures in the arts, including Alphonse Daudet, for whose play L'obstacle the teenaged Hahn composed incidental music. The play was presented at the Théâtre du Gymnase in December 1890. Daudet called Hahn's music his "chère musique préférée" (dear favourite music). At the Daudets' house in 1893 the singer Sybil Sanderson premiered Hahn's Chansons grises, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine. The poet was present and was moved to tears by Hahn's settings of his verse. Stéphane Mallarmé was also present, and wrote:
In the early 1890s Hahn worked on his first opera L'île du rêve, "a Polynesian idyll", written at Massenet's behest. During this period he met Marcel Proust for the first time, at Madeleine Lemaire's salon on 22 May 1894. As far as is known, the 19-year-old Hahn's romantic attachments before then had been intimate but platonic relationships with the famous Parisienne beauties Cléo de Mérode and Liane de Pougy. Until this point, he had been uneasy to the point of hostility about homosexuality and homosexuals, but the two men quickly began an intense love affair, Proust's only real liaison. Their affair lasted for only two years, but it evolved into a lifelong close friendship. Proust wrote, "Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo." The music scholar James Harding writes about the fictional Vinteuil Sonata: "It was Hahn who suggested to Proust the famous petite phrase which recurs symbolically throughout À la recherche du temps perdu and which is none other than a haunting theme from Saint-Saëns's D minor violin sonata". Hahn was also the inspiration for the eponymous protagonist of Proust's early unfinished novel Jean Santeuil (c. 1896–1900).
Hahn completed his studies at the Conservatoire satisfactorily but "without producing sparks in examinations and competitions", as his biographer Jacques Depaulis puts it. Massenet resigned from the faculty in May 1896, and Hahn left at the same time as his mentor.
In 1896 Proust wrote the words and Hahn the music for Portraits de peintres for reciter and piano, premiered at the house of Madeleine Lemaire, where they had met. Later in that year Hahn formed another of his closest friendships: he had long admired the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and at the end of 1896 he met her and quickly became part of her inner circle of friends and helpers. He frequently visited her in her dressing room during and after performances, lunched with her at her Paris townhouse, travelled with her to London and on tour, and composed music for her productions.
L'île du rêve was premiered in 1898, when thanks to Massenet's influence the Opéra-Comique staged the piece, with a fine cast, conducted by André Messager. The press notices were hostile, and the piece was withdrawn after seven performances. While it was in rehearsal Paris was agog at the Zola trial in the continuing Dreyfus affair. The affair sharply divided French opinion; Hahn, like Proust and Bernhardt, was in the Dreyfusard camp. The anti-Semitic overtones of the anti-Dreyfusard campaign disturbed him deeply, but his devotion to France was unshaken.
In 1898, following the success of his first set of 20 mélodies, published two years earlier, Hahn began composing a second set. which he worked on for more than 20 years. In the same year he started work on 12 "Rondels" for soloists, chorus and piano, completed the following year. In 1899, following the long tradition of French composers supplementing their income by writing music reviews, he became critic for La Presse.