Chanson d’amour (1882)

Après un rêve (1877)

Fleur jetée (1884)

Armand Silvestre - a fashionable poet of limited inspiration - was not in the same league as Gautier as a poet, or anywhere near it. 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. His setting of Chanson d’ amour is a song of considerable charm with a discreet counterpoint between the vocal line and, under the broken-chord figuration in the right hand, the bass line of the piano part.

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. 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 transcends 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).

There is nothing indolent about Silvestre’s Fleur jetée, which provoked a quite different response from that coaxed out of Fauré by Chanson d’amour. Out of the hundred or so poems he 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 found not in French song but in Schubert.