En sourdine Op.58, No.2 (1891)

Les Berceaux Op.23, No.1 (1879)

Les Roses d’Ispahan Op.39, No.4 (1884)

Fleur jetée Op.39, No.2 (1884)

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Gabriel Fauré, and En Sourdine, he might have added, is one of the most seductive of all his poems. Debussy made two settings of En Sourdine - one in his student days in 1882, the other in Fêtes galantes tens years later - but neither is as inspired as the one Fauré wrote for his first set of Verlaine songs, the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, in 1891. Making no special point of the song of the nightingale, it 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.

Although Sully-Prudhomme was not one of Fauré’s most favoured poets - he set only three of his poems - Les Berceaux must have been as attractive to him as the most suggestive of Verlaine’s. Based on the rocking rhythms appropriate to both the great ships on the quay and the cradles at home, Fauré’s setting sensitively parallels the duality of the text in the rhythmic and harmonic contradictions between the left and right hands of the piano part. Leconte de Lisle was a poet Fauré admired and set five times but always, apparently, with some misgivings. Aware of the problem with Les Roses d’Ispahan - which, he said, “is too full, too rich, too complete for music to be usefully adapted to it” - Fauré avoided the temptation of adding exotic melody or harmony to words already evocative enough of their Persian inspiration. The setting is for the most part quite simple, three of the four stanzas floating the same sweetly melodious vocal line over rhythms swaying in the piano part like the orange trees in the poem. The plaintive vocal line, the unsettled harmonies and the dark piano colouring of the third stanza reflect a changed situation and effectively offset the restoration of the fragrance at the end.

Of the hundred or so poems Fauré set to music, none moved him to such an intense expression of violence as Armand Silvestre’s Fleur jetée. It is a song which, though it has its German counterparts, is quite unlike anything else in French repertoire.