Le Désert

The striking opening of the work portraying the stark landscape, vast openness, and strange mysteries of the desert (to the European) through open harmonies and long sustained chords accompanies the entrance of the male chorus. The desert’s unutterable stillness is broken by distant chanting of the name of God, “Allah, Allah, Allah”. A caravan comes into view and the happy people sing of their carefree wandering life, except for the desert storms, one of which David portrays with typical storm music that owes much to Carl Maria von Weber.

David also possessed a real melodic gift, demonstrated by the opening of Part II, “La Nuit”. This ode for tenor solo is no doubt music Berlioz admired in this work since it owes something to his own technique when the voice enters almost unexpectedly after a long introductory instrumental nocturne. The technique is repeated at the beginning of Part III, “Le Lever du Soleil”, a musical portrait of the sunrise followed by the Chant du Muezzim. Although David’s sunrise is not quite a rival to Josef Haydn’s in The Creation, the call to prayer that follows is one of the historically key sections of the entire work. The long florid tenor solo over minimal accompaniment is the first real, let us say, Mohammaden music in Le Désert. David hints at these eastern influences in the somewhat simplistic and instrumental “Festival Arabe” at the end of Part II where he employs rather generic tropes that could signify any “other” you like, Turks, Gypsys, or Indians. The Chant du Muezzim, however, could only have been written by someone who had heard it as the sun’s blaze broke the horizons of Beirut or Cairo. David finally achieved success as a composer with this work for the concert hall in a hybrid form, but in France throughout most of the 19th century, true success only came in the opera house. Both of his most successful works for the stage were also on exotic themes. The operas La perle du Brésil (1851) and Lalla-Roukh (1862) both survived in the repertoire for several decades after their premiers due more to their musical content than their dramatic effects. They share all of the weaknesses that has caused Le Désert and all of David’s other works to fall from the repertoire and relegated him to the lower ranks of composers. But these weaknesses are more historical in nature than in any faults in David’s craft or creativity. Modern listeners will find the slow harmonic movement very slow, and the repetition of phrases and sections somewhat trying. There are however beautiful and moving moments in Le Désert laying bare David’s gifts: melody and atmosphere, evoking places quite different from those known by the population for which he wrote.

David Gilbert