Fleur jetée

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 eleven 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.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Nuit d’étoiles (1880)

Romance: Voici que le printemps (1884)

Beau soir (1880)

Mandoline (1882)

Nuit d’étoiles was the first of Debussy’s works to appear in print. Written in 1880, it was published two years later with a dedication to Mme Moreau-Sainti, a singing teacher who employed him as piano accompanist in her classes. It might have been a menial job for an ambitious Conservatoire student but, as we shall see, he did have reason to be grateful to the Moreau-Sainti singing classes.

The title of the song Nuit d’étoiles is not the same as that of the poem on which it is based: in Théodore de Banville’s 1846 collection Les Stalactites, it is headed La dernière Pensée de Weber (Weber’s Last Thought), which indicates some kind of musical inspiration behind it. Debussy’s response was to cut it and set it as a serenade with a refrain which, echoing Banville’s “triste lyre qui soupire,” is accompanied by arpeggiated piano chords in a variety of rhythmic figurations. The anticipation in the piano introduction of a theme later to be associated with Mélisande is all the more interesting in view of the similarly anctipatory reference to “notre fontaine” near the end of the song.

It was at Mme Moreau-Sainti’s singing classes the Debussy met a amateur but not unaccomplished soprano, the married but not unsusceptible Marie-Blanche Vasnier. Between 1881 and 1884 he wrote more than twenty songs for Mme Vasnier and, on leaving for the Villa Medici as the winner of the Prix de Rome, he presented them to her with a loving dedication in a specially bound leather volume. Both the Bourget settings included here - the charmingly tuneful Voici que le printemps and the poetic Beau soir with the evening’s message rising melodiously through the piano part to mingle with the vocal line - are featured in the Vasnier collection. So is Mandoline, the first of Debussy’s twenty Verlaine settings and, with its mixture of modal and diatonic harmonies matching the poet’s ironic view of the Watteau-esque scene before him, the most characteristic of his early songs.