Au Cimetière

Clair de lune - which was written in 1887, five years after Debussy’s setting of the same poem from Fêtes galantes - was the first of sixteen Fauré songs to words by Paul Verlaine. In the freshness of the composer’s discovery of a new sound world, as implied by the unheard music in the poet’s evocation of his Watteau-like nocturnal scene, it is probably also the most inspired. The modal minuet in the piano part, representing the gently rhythmic movement of the masked figures in their rococo landscape, leaves the supple vocal line to take shape entirely according to the natural inflections of the words.

Armand Silvestre was not in the same league as Verlaine as a poet, or anywhere near it. In some, if not all, of his eleven settings of Silvestre poems Fauré did, however, transcend the quality of the verse. Le Secret, which was completed in 1881, actually anticipates one of the most moving of his Verlaine settings, Prison, in the simple and regular rhythm of its chordal accompaniment and its economical vocal line. The last of Fauré’s three Prudhomme settings, Les Berceaux, written in 1879, is a contrastingly picturesque setting based on the rocking rhythms in the accompaniment, the syncopated left hand contradicting the right, and coloured by some liberated harmonies. Au Cimetière, the second of two Richepin settings written in 1888, combines the two techniques, suddenly stormy rhythms in the middle section interrupting the steady funereal tread of the piano part in the outer sections. Nothing, however, in all the hundred or so Fauré songs, equals the violence of his Silvestre setting of 1884, Fleur jetée, for which, there being no precedent in the French repertoire, he seems to have turned to Schubert for inspiration.