Clair de lune

Green

En sourdine

Fauré’s next important discovery after Leconte de Lisle was not Baudelaire - although he had in the meantime been inspired by Duparc’s example to set three poems by the author of Les Fleurs du mal - but Verlaine. According to Robert de Montesquiou, it was he who drew the composer’s attention to Verlaine by lending him a copy of the Fêtes galantes. It is difficult to believe, on the other hand, that Fauré was not already well aware of those poems, if only through the settings by Debussy. Anyway, Clair de lune, which was written in 1887, was the first of no fewer than eighteen Fauré songs to words by Verlaine. It is probably also the most inspired, the minuet in the piano part representing the gently rhythmic movement of the masqueraders while the vocal line is shaped entirely according to the natural inflections of the words. And yet, independent as they are, the two elements are clearly aware of each other in their symbolist landscape.

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Gabriel Fauré, speaking for generations of composers who have been drawn to this most musical of French poets since the Renaissance. Debussy was one of the earliest, writing the first of his eighteen uniquely inspired settings in 1882. Fauré, it seems, did not realise Verlaine’s musical potential until 1887, when he was given a copy of Fêtes galantes by Robert de Montesquiou. The great attraction, he discovered, was that Verlaine’s poetry not only suggests a musical dimension to the composer with the sensitivity to hear it but sometimes seems even to demand it from him: “There is a short poem by him, Green, which contains a fresh and melancholy landscape, but this landscape is only atmosphere, ambience. Harmony must be applied to underlining the profound sentiment which the words only sketch.”

An even better illustration of the musical potential of Verlaine’s poetry is Clair de Lune, Fauré’s first Verlaine setting and surely the most inspired of his songs up to the time he wrote it in 1887. The poem (from Fêtes galantes) is a scene in a Watteau painting, the unheard music of its “almost sad” masqueraders waiting to be made perceptible by the floating rhythms and exquisite modal ambiguity of the minuet in Fauré’s piano part. The still atmosphere of En sourdine (also from Fêtes galantes) is broken at the end by the song of the nightingale, a sound which the poet could presume to be familiar to any reader’s ear. So Fauré makes no special point of the birdsong and concentrates instead on the counterpoint of the lovers’ senses with the silence around them, sustaining the arpeggio accompaniment throughout but also drawing muted melodies in the pianist’s right hand through and round the vocal line. As for “underlining the profound sentiment” in Green (from Verlaine’s Romance sans paroles), it is done not so much by harmony as by a little motif which enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and which persists in its breathless way to the end of the song. En sourdine and Green, incidentally, are the second and third numbers of Fauré’s Cinq Mélodies de Venise (written partly in Venice and partly in Paris in 1891) where their thematic material gathers additional reverberations as they echo in the Verlaine songs later in the cycle.