Après un rêve, Op.7 No.1 (1877)

Adieu, Op.21 No.3 (1878)

Le secret, Op.23 No.3 (1880-81)

Fleur jetée, Op.39 No.2 (1884)

Marcel Proust, though an admirer of many of Fauré’s songs, dismissed the most famous of all of them as “worthless.” Those many musicians who have profited from arranging Après un rêve for a variety of instrumental combinations - not least Pablo Casals with his cello version - could not honestly agree with him. Nor can any listener susceptible to seductive melody and tumescent harmony. Written in 1877, just after the painful break-up of the composer’s engagement to one of Pauline Viardot’s daughters, the song touches on an emotional truth that flatters a text chosen not so much for its literary merit as for the sake of the friend who wrote it (or rather translated it, from an anonymous Tuscan original).

Adieu - the last of the three settings of words by Charles Grandmougin grouped together as a miniature cycle under the title Poème d’un jour - was written a year later than Après un rêve. Taken with the other two songs in the cycle, Rencontre and Toujours, it seems to reflect a philosophical acceptance of the composer’s broken relationship with Marianne Viardot. The second of the three stanzas inspires a change to the minor and a more expressive, rather more agitated piano part but the calm beauty of the melodic line of the first stanza is restored in its major-key security in the third - though not without a dangerous harmonic side-step towards the end and, perhaps, a hint of underlying regret before the final “Adieu!”

Armand Silvestre - a fashionable writer of limited inspiration - was not the greatest of Fauré’s poets. For a few years round 1880, however, when the composer was in his thirties and still developing his mature style, the “dreamy indolence” of Silvestre’s verse suited him very well. Some, if not all, of his ten Silvestre songs transcend by far the quality of the words. Le Secret, which was completed in 1881, actually anticipates one of the most moving of Fauré's great Verlaine settings, Prison, in the simple and regular rhythm of its chordal accompaniment and its economical vocal line.

There is nothing indolent about Silvestre’s Fleur jetée. Out of the hundred or so poems Fauré set to music, only one or two others moved him to such an intense expression of violence - the model for which, in this particular case, he clearly found not in French song but in Schubert.

Gerald Larner ©2003