La bonne Chanson Op.61 for voice, piano and string quintet (1892–1898) — Gabriel Fauré

Une Sainte en son auréole

Puisque l’aube grandit

La lune blanche

J’allais par des chemins perfides

J’ai presque peur, en vérité

Avant que tu ne t’en ailles

Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été

N’est-ce pas?

L’hiver a cessé

Paul Verlaine’s marriage to Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville in 1870 was not the best thing that ever happened to him. He might have thought it was at the time – and the twenty-one poems addressed to Mathilde in La bonne Chanson were inspired by that thought – but there are better reasons for getting married than the “Carlovingian name” of one’s fiancée. And, as the 16-year-old Mathilde soon realised, a drunken, violent, homosexual poet does not make an ideal husband.

None of this worried Gabriel Fauré when, twenty-two years after Verlaine’s marriage to Mathilde Mauté, he fell in love with Emma Bardac, then married to the long-suffering Sigismond Bardac and later to become the second wife of Claude Debussy. Fauré was married too and he found much in La bonne Chanson that was congenial to the ecstatic but insecure mood he was in at the time. Not a great beauty, Emma was elegant, intelligent, witty, and musically very gifted. She sang well and, better still, she was an excellent sight-reader: “I never wrote anything more spontaneously than La bonne Chanson,” Fauré is quoted as saying, “and I was aided by the spontaneity of the singer who remained its most moving interpreter - a spontaneity at least the equal of my own. I have never known any pleasure to equal that which I felt as I heard these pages coming to life, one after the other, as I brought them to her.”

The first public performance of La bonne Chanson in the original voice-and-piano version was given by Jeanne Lemaire and the composer in Paris in 1895. When Fauré first heard the present version with piano and string quintet in London three years later he had mixed feelings about it: “My impression at the first rehearsal had been quite good,” he wrote to his wife. Then, after dismissing it as “detestable and useless,” he came to the more moderate conclusion that it was merely “superfluous” and that he preferred the “simple piano accompaniment.” In reality, however, the piano accompaniment is not so simple and the chamber version is useful at least in clarifying the sometimes complex contrapuntal textures, not least in the first song in the cycle, and adding to the descriptive colouring, not least in Avant que tu ne t’en ailles.

While there is nothing “Carlovingian” about the name of Emma Bardac-Moÿse, Une Sainte en son auréole, which ends with that chivalrous allusion, was one of the first of the nine poems Fauré selected from La bonne Chanson. It was set to music in September 1892 and stands at the head of the cycle as it was published in 1894. Radiantly innocent in its modal linearity and at the same time ironic in the dissonance applied to “la note d’or que fait entendre un cor” and “un doux accord patricien” it is a peculiarly ambivalent setting in the romantic circumstances. Puisque l’aube grandit, which was written several months later, is closer to the lyrical confession one might expect. The structure of Verlaine’s poem is reflected in the proliferating modulations, the approach to the conclusion registered in an augmentation of the triplet piano figuration while the vocal line recalls the opening of the song, the ending neatly coinciding with the return of the tonic key.

La lune blanche – perhaps the most inspired of well over a hundred settings of the same words by composers as different as, say, Chausson and Stravinsky – was so close to Fauré’s heart that an allusion to his early song Lydia, a melodic image he now associates with Emma Bardac, enters the violin part just before the passionately vocalised “O bien-aimée.” The most poetic thought, “C’est l’heure exquise,” emerges from a harmonic daze at the end. It was no doubt the risks taken with tonality here and at the beginning of J’allais par des chemins perfides that convinced Saint-Saëns that his former pupil had gone “completely mad” – even though the expressive intention, as when the tonic major is established for the last two lines of the latter song, is always quite clear.

Thematic echoes heard from song to song so far in the cycle have been so subtle that they might have been accidental. It is obvious from the frequent references to Une Sainte en son auréole in J’ai presque peur en vérité – where they offer the only melodic interest in the rhythmically anxious accompaniment – that the thematic echoes are part of a long-term formal strategy. Even Avant que tu ne t’en ailles which seems, on the contrary, to threaten cohesion by interleaving pages of what could be two different songs, eventually finds its due place in the structural pattern .

In the piano part at the end of Avant que tu ne t’en ailles a new theme emerges on the appearance of “le soleil d’or” and is taken up again in the second line of Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été as an image of “le grand soleil” which illuminates the poet’s wedding day and which, with an echo of ”Que je vous aime” from the end of J’ai presque peur en vérité, gives way to the cooler light of the stars in the last stanza. Although there is another hint of irony in N’est-ce pas?, where nightingales sing in alien harmonies and lovers walk in syncopation rather than in step, the same “Que je vous aime” melody reassuringly recurs at the end.

It was a year after writing the first eight songs that Fauré was able to put them in a suitable order and find an appropriate conclusion in a setting of L’hiver a cessé, which is the last item in the Verlaine collection and which is set here as a kind of recapitulation. It takes the calls of the quails and skylarks in Avant que tu ne t’en ailles as its main theme and, in its impetuous welcome of spring and its final declaration of love, incorporates most of the other significant motifs of the cycle.

Une Sainte en son auréole

Une Sainte en son auréole,

Une châtelaine en sa tour,

Tout ce que contient la parole

Humaine de grâce et d’amour;

La note d’or que fait entendre

Un cor dans le lointain des bois

Mariée à la fierté tendre

Des nobles Dames d’autrefois;

Avec cela le charme insigne

D’un frais sourire triomphant

Eclos dans des candeurs de cygne

Et des rougeurs de femme-enfant;

Des aspects nacrés, blancs et roses,

Un doux accord patricien:

Je vois, j’entends toute ces choses

Dans son nom Carlovingien.

A Saint in her halo

A Saint in her halo,

A châtelaine in her tower,

Everything which speaks

Of grace and love;

The golden note sounded

By a horn in distant woods

Allied to the tender pride

Of noble Ladies of former times;

With that the supreme charm

Of a fresh and triumphant smile

Flowering in swan-white innocence

and woman-child blushes;

Pearly, white and rosy looks,

Gentle patrician harmony:

I see, I hear all these things

In her Carlovingian name.

Puisque l’aube grandit

Puisque l’aube grandit, puisque voici l’aurore,

Puisque, après m’avoir fui longtemps, l’espoir veut bien

Revoler devers moi qui l’appelle et l’implore,

Puisque tout ce bonheur veut bien être le mien,

Je veux, guidé par vous, beaux yeux aux flammes douces,

Par toi conduit, ô main où tremblera ma main,

Marcher droit, que ce soit par des sentiers de mousses

Ou que rocs et cailloux encombrent le chemin;

Et comme, pour bercer les lenteurs de la route,

Je chanterai des airs ingénus, je me dis

Qu’elle m’écoutera sans déplaisir sans doute;

Et vraiment je ne veux pas d’autre Paradis.

Since the sun is rising

Since the sun is rising, since dawn is here,

Since, having eluded me for a long time, hope is ready

To fly back to me, as I call and implore it,

Since all this happines is ready to be mine,

I want, guided by you, lovely eyes with gentles flames,

Led by you, oh hand in which my hand will tremble,

To walk straight, whether on mossy paths

or on a road obstructed by rocks and pebbles;

And as, to ease the passing of time on the road,

I sing artless tunes, I tell myself

That she will surely listen to me not without pleasure;

And really I want no other Paradise.

La lune blanche

Luit dans les bois;

De chaque branche

Part une voix

Sous la ramée…

O bien-aimée.

L’étang reflète,

Profond miroir,

La silhouette

Du saule noir

Où le vent pleure…

Rêvons, c’est l’heure,

Un vaste et tendre

Apaisement

Semble descendre du firmament

Que l’astre irise…

C’est l’heure exquise.

The white moon

Shines in the woods;

From each branch

A voice is heard

Under the branches…

Oh my love.

The pond reflects,

In its deep mirror,

The silhouette

Of the black willow

Where the wind is weeping…

Let us dream, it is time,

A vast and tender

Tranquillity

Seems to descend from the firmament

Iridiscent with stars…

It is the time of enchantment.

J’allais par des chemins perfides

J’allais par des chemins perfides,

Douloureusement incertain.

Vos chères mains furent mes guides.

Si pâle à l’horizon lointain

Luisait un faible espoir d’aurore;

Votre regard fut le matin.

Nul bruit, sinon son pas sonore,

N’encourageait le voyageur.

Votre voix me dit: “Marche encore!”

Mon coeur craintif, mon sombre coeur

Pleurait, seul, sur la triste voie;

L’amour, délicieux vainqueur,

Nous a réunis dans la joie.

I went by treacherous paths

I went by treacherous paths,

Painfully uncertain.

Your dear hands were my guides.

So pale on the distant horizon

Shone a feeble hope of dawn;

Your eyes were the morning.

No sound, except his own footfall,

Encouraged the traveller.

Your voice said to me: “Walk on!”

My timid heart, my heavy heart

Wept, alone, on the unhappy way;

Love, delightful in victory,

Has united us in joy.

J’ai presque peur, en vérité

J’ai presque peur, en vérité,

Tant je sens ma vie enlacée

A la radieuse pensée

Qui m’a pris l’âme l’autre été.

Tant votre image, à jamais chère,

Habite en ce coeur tout à vous,

Mon coeur uniquement jaloux

De vous aimer et de vous plaire;

Et je tremble, pardonnez-moi

D’aussi franchement vous le dire,

A penser qu’un mot, un sourire

De vous est désormais ma loi,

Et qu’il vous suffirait d’un geste,

D’une parole ou d’un clin d’oeil,

Pour mettre tout mon être en deuil

De son illusion céleste.

Mais plutôt je ne veux vous voir,

L’avenir dût-il m’être sombre

Et fécond en peines sans nombre,

Qu’à travers un immense espoir,

Plongé dans ce bonheur suprême

De me dire encore et toujours,

En dépit des mornes retours,

Que je vous aime, que je t’aime!

I’m almost afraid, in truth

I’m almost afraid, in truth,

So much do I feel my life tied in

With the radiant thought

That captivated my soul last summer.

So much does your image, for ever dear,

Live in this heart which is devoted to you,

My heart anxious only

To love you and to please you;

And I tremble, forgive me

For telling you so frankly,

To think that just one word, one smile

From you is henceforth law to me,

And that only one gesture from you,

One word or one flicker of your eye,

Is enough to put all my being into mourning

For a celestial lost illusion.

But I’d rather see you,

If the future has to be dark for me

And fertile in countless pains,

Only through an immense hope,

Plunged in this supreme happiness

Of repeating to myself for ever,

In spite of dismal setbacks,

That I love you, that I love you!

Avant que tu ne t’en ailles

Avant que tu ne t’en ailles,

Pâle étoile du matin,

- Mille cailles

Chantent dans le thym. -

Tourne devers le poète,

Dont les yeux sont pleins d’amour;

- L’alouette

Monte au ciel avec le jour. -

Tourne ton regard que noie

L’aurore dans son azur;

- Quelle joie

Parmis les champs de blé mûr!-

Puis fais luire ma pensée

Là-bas, - bien loin, oh, bien loin!

- La rosée

Gaîment brille sur le foin. -

Dans le doux rêve où s’agite

Ma vie endormie encor…

- Vite, vite,

Car voici le soleil d’or.-

Before you go away

Before you go away,

Pale morning star,

- A thousand quails

Are singing in the thyme. -

Turn towards the poet,

Whose eyes are full of love;

- The skylark

Is rising in the sky with the day. -

Turn your face drowned

In the azure of the dawn;

- What joy

In the fields of ripe corn! -

Then make my thoughts glow

Down there, - far, oh, far away!

- Dew is

Shining gaily on the hay. -

In the sweet dream where stirs

My life that’s sleeping still…

- Quick, quick,

For here is the golden sun.-

Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été

Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été;

Le grand soleil, complice de ma joie,

Fera, parmi le satin et la soie,

Plus belle encor votre chère beauté;

Le ciel tout bleu, comme une haute tente,

Frissonnera somptueux à longs plis

Sur nos deux fronts heureux qu’auront pâlis

L’émotion du bonheur et l’attente;

Et quand le soir viendra, l’air sera doux

Qui se jouera, caressant, dans vos voiles,

Et les regards paisibles des étoiles

Bienveillamment souriront aux époux.

So, it will be on a clear summer’s day

So, it will be on a clear summer’s day:

The great sun, accomplice of my joy,

Will, with the satin and the silk,

Render even more beautiful your dear beauty;

The pure blue sky, like a tall tent,

Will tremble sumptuous in long folds

On our two foreheads turned pale

By the emotion of happiness and anticipation;

And when evening comes, the air will be gentle

And will play, caressingly, with your veils,

And the peaceable light of the stars

Will smile benevolently on man and wife.

N’est-ce pas?

.............................................................................

N’est-ce pas? nous irons, gais et lents, dans la voie

Modeste que nous montre en souriant l’Espoir,

Peu soucieux qu’on nous ignore ou qu’on nous voie.

Isolés dans l’amour ainsi qu’en bois noir,

Nos deux coeurs, exhalant leur tendresse paisible,

Seront deux rossignols qui chantent dans le soir.

............................................................................

Sans nous préoccuper de ce que nous destine

Le Sort, nous marcherons pourtant du même pas,

Et la main dans la main, avec l’âme enfantine

De ceux que s’aiment sans mélange, ne’est-ce pas?

Isn’t that so?

.......................................................................................

Isn’t that so? We will walk, happy and unhurried, on the

Modest path that Hope has shown us with a smile,

Caring little if no one knows of us or if anyone sees us.

Isolated in love as in a dark wood,

Our two hearts, sighing their peaceful tenderness,

Will be two nightingales singing their evening song.

................................................................................

Without worrying about what is destined for us

By Fate, we will walk in step just the same,

Hand in hand, with the childish spirit

Of those whose love is unalloyed. Isnt’ that so?

L’hiver a cessé

L’hiver a cessé: la lumière est tiède

Et danse, du sol au firmament clair.

Il faut que le coeur le plus triste cède

A l’immense joie éparse dans l’air.

.....................................................

J’ai depuis un an le printemps dans l’âme

Et le vert retour du doux floréal,

Ainsi qu’une flamme entoure une flamme,

Met de l’idéal sur mon idéal.

Le ciel bleu prolonge, exhausse et couronne

L’immuable azur où rit mon amour.

La saison est belle et ma part est bonne

Et tous mes espoirs ont enfin leur tour.

Que vienne l’été! que viennent encore

L’automne et l’hiver! Et chaque saison

Me sera charmante, ô Toi que décore

Cette fantaisie et cette raison!

Winter is over

Winter is over; the light is mild

And it dances, from ground to clear firmament.

The saddest heart must make way

For the immense joy spreading through the air.

........................................................................

For a year I have had spring in my soul

And the green return of gentle Floréal,

Like a flame surrounding a flame,

Adds an ideal to my ideal.

The blue sky prolongs, heightens and crowns

The immutable azure where my love lives smiling.

The season is fine and my portion is good

And all my hopes have their turn at last.

Let summer come! Let even

Autumn and winter come! And each season

Will enchant me, oh You adorned

By fantasy and reason alike!