Aubade Op.6 No.1 [c1873]

Sérénade toscane Op.3 No.2 [c1878]

Hymne Op.7 No.2 [c1870]

Clair de lune Op.46, No.2 [1887]

Prison Op.83 No.1 [1894]

Notre amour Op.23 No.2 [1879]

If Fauré’s literary tastes were not impeccable, least of all in his early years as a song composer, there is no point in regretting it. He chose what was right for him at the time. As the young favourite of the Parisian salons in this twenties and thirties, when poetry of the stature of Paul Verlaine’s might well have weighed heavily on his sociable inspiration, he had a rare gift for transforming mediocre verse into music of great charm and no little beauty.

    The poetry of Louis Pomey, for example, has little to recommend it. But in Faurés setting his Aubade becomes a delightful little serenade irresistible in its delicately strummed accompaniment and its seductive harmonic departures in the middle of each stanza. Written perhaps five years later in about 1878, the Sérénade toscane is a setting of anonymous Italian words freely translated by Romain Bussine and, above all in the understated pathos of the piano part, it is a far better example of its kind than its models in Pauline Viardot’s Poésies toscanes. The earliest song in this group, Hymne is a youthful reaction to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which provoked a song that is engagingly impulsive and yet at the same time, in the expanding intervals of its vocal line, uncharacteristically histrionic.

    Clair de lune - written in 1887, five years after Debussy’s setting of the same poem from Fêtes galantes - was the first of Fauré’s sixteen 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. Prison, his last Verlaine setting, is a contrastingly stark but effectively dramatic reaction to the poet’s bitter self-recriminations (published in Sagesses) in prison in Brussels after his attack on Arthur Rimbaud in 1873.

As for Armand Silvestre, for a few years round 1880 the “dreamy indolence” of his verse suited Fauré very well. Notre amour, one the earliest of his Silvestre settings is also one of the most attractive - not only for its lightly articulated rhythmic impulse but also for the developing interest of both the accompaniment and the vocal line as the song approaches its brief climax at the end.