Les roses d’Ispahan Op39 No4 (1884)

Mandoline (Verlaine) Op58 No1 (1891)

Clair de lune (Verlaine) Op46 No2 (1887)

Prison (Verlaine) Op83 No1 (1894)

La fée aux chansons (Silvestre) Op27 No2 (1882)

Of the twenty or so writers whose poems Fauré set to music, Paul Verlaine and Armand Silvestre were among the three or four he found most congenial to work with. But when he said that he had “rarely succeeded in setting Leconte de Lisle” he was being too modest. His five settings of verse by the leader of the Parnassiens, produced at more or less regular intervals between 1870 and 1897, are all of the highest quality and in no way inferior to the masterpieces inspired by Verlaine and Silvestre during the same period.

Les Roses d’Ispahan, written as soon as the poem was first published in Leconte’s Poèmes tragiques in 1884, is one of the most attractive. Aware of the problem with the verse - which, he said, “is too full , too rich, too complete for music for music to be usefully adapted to it” - Fauré avoided the temptation of adding orientally inflected melody or harmony to words already evocative enough of their exotic 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. What makes the song so interesting is the third stanza, where the plaintive vocal line, the unsettled harmonies and the dark piano colouring reflect the changed situation and so poignantly offset the restoration of the fragrance at the end.

Mandoline Op58 No1 (1891)

Clair de lune Op46 No2 (1887)

Prison Op83 No1 (1894)

La fée aux chansons Op27 No2 (1882)

When Fauré said that he had “never succeeded in setting Victor Hugo to music and rarely Leconte de Lisle” he was being too modest. While it might be true that his Hugo songs are not among his greatest, his five settings of verse by Leconte de Lisle, produced at more or less regular intervals between 1870 and 1897, are all of the highest quality and in no way inferior to the masterpieces inspired by Paul Verlaine and Armand Silvestre during the same period.

Les Roses d’Ispahan, written soon after the poem was first published in Leconte’s Poèmes tragiques in 1884, is one of the most attractive. Aware of the problem with the verse - which, he said, “is too full , too rich, too complete for music 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. What makes the song so special is the third stanza, where the plaintive vocal line, the unsettled harmonies and the dark piano colouring reflect the changed situation and so poignantly offset the restoration of the fragrance at the end.

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Fauré, speaking for generations of composers who have been drawn to this most musical of French poets. 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.

Mandoline, a serenade with a plucked accompaniment and a melodiously flexible vocal line, is an outstanding example of Fauré’s response to Verlaine’s musical inspiration. The first of the Cinq Mélodies de Venise, Op.58 - a Verlaine cycle begun in Venice and completed in Paris in 1891 - it is a less satirical but no less authentic interpretation of the scene than the Debussy setting of 1882. An even better illustration is Clair de Lune, Fauré’s first Verlaine setting (also from Fêtes Galantes and also set earlier by Debussy) which is surely the most beautiful of his songs up to the time he wrote it in 1887. The unheard music of its “almost sad” masqueraders is made perceptible by the floating rhythms and exquisite modal ambiguity of the minuet in the piano part. Prison - Fauré’s last Verlaine setting, written in 1894 - is a less obvious choice. It is an uncharacteristically stark and harmonically bitter but highly dramatic reaction to the poet’s bitter self-recriminations (published in Sagesses) in prison in Brussels after his attack on his lover Arthur Rimbaud in 1873.

Of the twenty or so writers whose poems Fauré set to music, Armand Silvestre was not the most distinguished. For a few years round 1880, however, when the composer was in his thirties and still developing his mature style, the “dreamy indolence” of Silvestre’s verse suited him very well. La fée aux chansons, for example, is a delightful inspiration, the voice taking flight against fluttering figures in the right hand and a more sustained melodic line in the left, the harmonies as volatile as the birds, the moto perpetuo figuration failing only briefly during their absence in the autumn.