6 mélodies

Le papillon et la fleur (1861)

Au bord de l’eau (1875)

Après un rêve (1877)

Lydia (1870)

Les berceaux (1879)

Mandoline (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. It took him some time to make the discovery however. Debussy wrote the first of his eighteen Verlaine settings in 1882, five years before Fauré was given a copy of Fétes galantes by the poet’s influential friend and champion Robert de Montesquiou, the real-life model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

Fauré’s first literary inspiration was Victor Hugo, five of whose poems he set when he was still a student at the École Niedermeyer – including his earliest published song, Le Papillon et la fleur, which was written, he said, “in the school refectory among the smells from the kitchen.” Its delicately flighty piano part is no less fragrant for that and its waltz-time tunefulness no less entertaining. He later confessed that he had never really succeeded in setting Hugo because his verse is “too full, too rich, too complete for useful musical treatment.” He was, in fact, better off with the less opulent verse of Sully Prudhomme. The elusive emotions of Au bord de l’eau are reflected in a setting remarkable for its metrical fluidity and the subtle harmonic shifts applied to its hypnotic, curiously Spanish-flavoured thematic material.

Marcel Proust, an admirer of many of Fauré’s songs, declared Après un rêve “worthless.” Those many musicians who have profited from arranging it for a variety of instrumental combinations - not least Pablo Casals with his cello version - could not honestly agree with him. Written just after the painful break of the composer’s engagement with one of Pauline Viardot’s daughters, the song touches from time to time on an emotional truth that transcends a text chosen for its association with the friend who translated it (from an anonymous Tuscan original) rather than its literary merit.

Although Fauré felt that Leconte de Lisle was as difficult to set as Victor Hugo, he said that in his case he had “rarely” rather than “never” made a success of it. Lydia is surely one of the rare successes. Aware no doubt that Leconte de Lisle had written his poem in the (supposed) manner of Gallus, Fauré set the words with appropriately classical restraint and with a both witty and emotive allusion to the Lydian mode in the first line. With that line and its mixture of diatonic and modal intervals, Fauré seems to have found something essential of himself: certainly, it was to echo through his music, most significantly in La bonne Chanson, until as late as the Second Piano Quintet. In Lydia those very personal harmonies have the effect of heightening the intimacy which is further enhanced by the dialogue, modest though it is, between the piano and the voice.

Although Sully-Prudhomme was not one of Fauré’s most favoured poets - he set only three of his poems - Les Berceaux must have been as attractive to him as the most suggestive of Verlaine’s were to be. Based on the rocking rhythms appropriate to both the great ships on the quay and the cradles at home, Fauré’s setting sensitively parallels the duality of the text in the rhythmic and harmonic contradictions between the left and right hands of the piano part.

The great attraction with Verlaine, Fauré discovered when he first approached him by way of Clair de lune in 1887, was that his verse not only suggests a musical dimension to the composer with the sensitivity to hear it but sometimes seems even to demand it from him. Mandoline, a serenade with a plucked accompaniment and a melodiously flexible vocal line, was the third of his eighteen Verlaine songs and is an outstanding example of the inspiration he found in the Fêtes galantes. The first of the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, Op.58 – a Verlaine cycle begun in Venice and completed in Paris in 1891 – it is a less satirical but no less authentic interpretation of the scene than the Debussy setting of 1882.