4 mélodies to words by Paul Verlaine

Spleen Op.51 No.3 (1888)

Mandoline Op.58 No.1 (1891)

Clair de lune Op.46 No.2 (1887)

En sourdine Op.58 No.2 (1891)

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Gabriel Fauré, speaking for generations of composers who have been drawn to this most musical of French poets. Debussy was one of the earliest, writing the first of his eighteen uniquely inspired settings in 1882. Fauré, it seems, did not realise Verlaine’s musical potential until 1887, when he was given a copy of Fêtes galantes by Robert de Montesquiou. The great attraction, he discovered, was that the poetry not only suggests a musical dimension to the composer with the sensitivity to hear it but sometimes seems even to demand it from him. Reading through Verlaine’s Il pleure dans mon coeur – before setting it under the misleading title of Spleen – Fauré must have been moved as much by the sounds the poet cannot express as by the melancholy sentiment he does express. The composer supplies not only the acoustic effect of the “soft sound of the rain” in patterings exchanges of staccato figuration between the two hands of the pianist but also its emotional effect in short melodic phrases set in harmonious counterpoint with the vocal line.

Spleen was the second of Fauré’s Verlaine settings. The next five, including two songs chosen for this programme, were published as a cycle, Cinq Mélodies de Venise, which was started in Venice in 1891 and finished in Paris later in the same year. Mandoline, the only one of the five which was actually completed in Venice, is a serenade with a plucked accompaniment and a melodiously flexible vocal line. A less satirical but no less authentic interpretation of the scene than Debussy’s 1882 setting of the same words, it is an outstanding example of Fauré’s response to the poet’s musical inspiration. A no less convincing illustration is Fauré’s first Verlaine setting, Clair de Lune, which is surely the most beautiful of his songs up to the time he wrote it in 1887. The unheard music of its “almost sad” masqueraders is made perceptible by the floating rhythms and exquisite modal ambiguity of the minuet in the piano part. En sourdine, the other item from the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, makes no special point of the nightingale (unlike Debussy’s setting) and concentrates instead on the counterpoint of the lovers’ senses with the silence around them, sustaining the arpeggio accompaniment throughout but also drawing muted melodies in the pianist’s right hand through and round the vocal line.