“Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo.”

Originally presented at the Unitarian Churches of Rocky River and Shaker Heights

By the age of nineteen in 1894, the musical child prodigy, Reynaldo Hahn, had written many songs about love; however, his worldly sophistication masked shyness about his own personal feelings. He had close intimate friendships with women but he reportedly loved them only at a distance his whole life.

1894 was to prove a fateful year for Hahn. At the home of artist Madeleine Lemaire, he met an aspiring writer three years older than himself. The writer was the then little-known, “highly strung and snobby” Marcel Proust. Proust and Hahn shared a love for painting, literature, and the composer, Gabriel Fauré. They became lovers and often traveled together and collaborated on various projects. One of those projects, Portraits de peintres (1896), is a work consisting of spoken text with piano accompaniment.

Hahn honed his writing skills during this period, becoming one of the best critics on music and musicians. Seldom appreciating his contemporaries, he instead admired the artists of the past (shown in his portraits of legendary figures). His writing, like Proust’s, was characterized by a deft skill in depicting small details.

Proust’s unfinished autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil, posthumously published and, by some, considered ill-structured, nevertheless shows nascent genius and foreshadows his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust began to write it in 1895, one year after meeting Hahn (on whom the hero is reportedly based). Although by 1896 they were no longer lovers, they remained mutually supportive colleagues until Proust’s death in 1922.