En sourdine

En sourdine is one of Fauré’s Cinq mélodies de Venise, five Verlaine settings ostensibly composed in Venice in May and June 1891, although only Mandoline and part of En sourdine were actually written there at that time. The set was completed, with subtle harmonic and melodic links drawn between some of the songs, on the composer’s return to Paris later in the summer. Debussy set the same poem twice, for Mme Vasnier in 1882 and in his Fêtes galantes ten years later. Neither Debussy setting, however, is as inspired as Fauré’s, which makes no special point of the song of the nightingale 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.

“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.