Chanson d’amour, Op.27, No.1 [1882]

Aurore, Op.39, No.1 [1884]

La fée aux chansons, Op.27, No.2 [1882]

Le Secret, Op.23, No.3 [1880-81]

Notre amour, Op.23, No.2 [1879]

Of the twenty or so writers whose poems Fauré set to music, Armand Silvestre was not the most distinguished. 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. Chanson d’ amour, for example, 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. If Aurore seems at first to be little better than the average salon romance of the day, it takes on a different colour in the middle section, where the harmonies turn to the minor and a subtle two-note suggestion of the “chant plaintif, éternel et lointain” mingles with the restless semquavers in the right hand of the piano part. La fée aux chansons is a delightful inspiration, the voice taking flight against fluttering figures in the right hand and a more sustained melodic line in the left.

In Le Secret Fauré comprehensively transcends the quality of Silvestre’s verse and anticipates one of the most moving of his Verlaine settings, Prison, in the simple and regular rhythm of the chordal accompaniment and the economical vocal line. Notre amour, one the earliest of Fauré’s Silvestre settings is also one of the most attractive - not only for its lightly articulated rhythmic impulse but also for the developing interest in both the accompaniment and the vocal line as the song approaches its brief climax at the end.

Aurore, Op.39, No.1 [1884]

La Fée aux chansons, Op.27, No.2 [1882]

Le Secret, Op.23, No.3 [1880-81]

Notre amour, Op.23, No.2 [1879]

Armand Silvestre was not the most distinguished author of poems set to music by Fauré For a few years round 1880, however, when the composer was still developing his own style, the “dreamy indolence” of Silvestre’s verse suited him very well.

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 ten 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.