Le jardin clos Op. 106 (1914)

Exaucement

Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux

La messagère,

Je me poserai sur ton coeur

Dans la nymphée

Dans la pénombre

Il m’est cher, Amour, le bandeau

Inscription sur le sable

Le jardin clos is a cycle of renunciation – for us today as it was for Fauré in 1914. What we have to renounce is our expectation of the seductive charm which is such a distinctive quality of the vast majority of Fauré mélodies regularly performed in our song recitals. For him, in his 70th year at the beginning of a war that caught him on the wrong side of the border with Germany before he could escape to Geneva, it was a renunciation of much that he held most dear.

On 21 July Fauré had written to his wife from Ems, where he was taking a cure, to tell her that he had started work on “a group of three or four mélodies” to words by the Belgian poet, Charles Van Leberghe, whose poems he had drawn on a few years earlier for his previous song cycle, La Chanson d’Ève: “I can find nothing, alas, in the work of contemporary French poets,” he explained, “nothing that calls music to mind!” In Van Leberghe’s symbolist Entrevisions he found love poetry that might once have sent him into romantic raptures but which now inspired very mixed feelings and a highly economical, though no less intense, way of expressing them. It is not so much a matter of emotion recollected in tranquillity as of emotion recollected with a keen, sometimes bewildered sense of loss.

The fundamental difference between La jardin clos and La Bonne Chanson is that in 1914 Fauré had no relationship such as he had had with Emma Bardac in the early 1890s to add a personal, concordant dimension to the sentiments of the text. Nor was he likely to have any such relationship again. A remarkable feature common to the first seven songs of Le jardin clos is that they begin in a clearly defined major key, as though the composer identified with the poet’s sentiment, but within a few bars desert it in a tortuous series of modulations and return to it only in the closing bars. That common feature does not make a cycle, however. Nor does the consistent textural economy in which the pianist’s right hand more or less clearly traces a unison line with the voice while, in most cases, the left hand offers a counterpoint to it. If it is a cycle, rather than a “suite de huit mélodies” as Fauré put it – and there is certainly no coherent key relationship between the songs and no recurring theme – a tenuous link is initiated in Exaucement, where the one allusion to the opening C major before the very end is on the words “jardin clos.”­

Although the eroticism of Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux (F major) is intensified by dissonances, when it comes to the crucial “Est-ce moi que tu as choisi?” there is another clear chord of C major. La messagère (G major) – which offers a limpid example of a contrapuntal relationship between vocal line and bass line – is harmonically highly adventurous, not least in the mysterious third stanza poised between night and dawn, but the climactic “rire d’or” is hamonised in C major. Still more interestingly, in the harmonically precarious, infinitely delicate Je me poserai sur ton coeur (E flat major), with its syncopated rocking motion in the left hand, Fauré repeats the first two lines of the second stanza at the end as though to give himself the opportunity to slip briefly into C major as he does it. Dans la nymphée (D flat major), one of Fauré’s most eloquent hymnic inspirations, differs from its companions in that it makes an early recall of its tonic harmonies, but not before the amazing modulation to C major at the beginning of the third bar on “Pense en ton âme.”

The one occurrence of C major in Dans la pénombre (E major) – a spinning song which halts its rhythmic rotation between left hand and right to contemplate the beauty of dawn in spring – can scarcely be claimed as significant. C major doesn’t occur at all in the activity of Il m’est cher, Amour, le bandeau (F major) where Fauré both recovers and sustains the authentic erotic thrill. In Inscription sur le sable, however, he renounces it. Beginning and ending in E minor, the last song of Le jardin clos seems to accept the death of the eternal feminine. In fact, it transcends death as the harmonies progress to a climax on C major, the spiritual tonic of the cycle, with the words “impérissables diamants” – the imperishable songs love has left behind?