Making his Newport Classical debut on October 3 is violinist Blake Pouliot, joined by acclaimed pianist Henry Kramer, returning to our stage for a highly anticipated collaboration. Together, they present a captivating program steeped in the spirit of Romanticism. At the center of their program lies Chausson’s enigmatic Poème, Op. 25, a staple in the violin repertoire. Neither concerto nor sonata, it is instead a rhapsodic programmatic on the violin’s voice, full of longing phrases and sudden surges of passion.
Like many composers of the late 19th century, Chausson was deeply moved by Russian literature’s raw emotional intensity. When commissioned to write a work for the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), Chausson turned to Ivan S. Turgenev’s novella Le chant de l’amour triomphant (The Song of Triumphant Love, 1881). A tale of jealousy, obsession, and desire, it tells the story of a love triangle between two artists and the woman they both covet, where passion becomes so consuming that it borders on the supernatural. The story itself was loosely inspired by Turgenev’s own entanglement with mezzo-soprano Pauline García (1821–1910), whom he first encountered in Moscow in 1841 as Rosina in The Barber of Seville. When García returned to France and married Louis Viardot, Turgenev followed soon after. He lived in the Viardot household from 1845 until his death, helping raise García’s four children, while she served as his critic, confidante, and champion. Their relationship, whether platonic or romantic, remains an enigma. If The Song of Triumphant Love offers any clue, it only deepens the mystery.
Chausson translated Turgenev’s fevered emotional landscape into music that resists clear form yet never loses direction. Like the novella, Poème is charged with an atmosphere of tension and release: sighing violin lines swell into soaring climaxes, only to collapse back into restless quiet. Harmonic shifts that create a sense of instability, mirroring the psychological unease of characters caught between love, rivalry, and obsession.
What makes Poème so enduring is its refusal to resolve neatly. The piece unfolds like a stream of consciousness, a musical embodiment of desire itself, ardent, volatile, and impossible to contain. For listeners, it remains less a “story” than a state of being, one that suspends us between ecstasy and anguish. In this way, Chausson’s music captures not only the essence of Turgenev’s tale but also the broader Romantic fascination with the sublime: art that lingers in ambiguity, where beauty and pain are inseparable.
