Feuillet d’album (1889?)

There is no need to speculate on the characterisation of Chabrier’s Feuillet d’album. Apparently alluding to an illustration for the piece when it was first published as a supplement to a magaziine in 1890, the composer described it as a “blonde and very pale little girl, dreamy and tender; that’s the feeling.” Another Parisian – or so it seems from the way the slow waltz idiom anticipates Satie’s cabaret songs – she most touchingly equivocates between major and minor. After wandering into a harmonic dream world in the middle section she returns with her melody in octaves – which, as Poulenc observed in his admiring comment on “Chabrier’s most tender piece of music,” was one of the older composer’s favourites devices.