Lydia

Clair de lune

Chanson d’amour

Les Roses d’Ispahan

Après un rêve

“I wish I had written that,” said Massenet on first hearing Lydia. He might not have been so happy to claim authorship of Fauré’s earlier songs - a handful of drawing-room romances, most of them to words by Victor Hugo - but this was different. Aware no doubt that Leconte de Lisle had written his poem in the (supposed) manner of Gallus, Fauré set the words with appropriately classical restraint and with a both witty and emotive allusion to the Lydian mode in the first line. With that line and its mixture of diatonic and modal intervals, Fauré seems to have found something essential of himself: certainly, it was to echo through his music, most significantly in La bonne Chanson, until as late as the Second Piano Quintet. In Lydia those very personal harmonies have the effect of heightening the intimacy which is further enhanced by the dialogue, modest though it is, between the piano and the voice. Written in 1870, Lydia is also the first of Fauré’s mélodies presenting new melodic material where expression requires it rather than conforming to the all-too predictable strophic construction of the conventional romance.

Fauré’s next important discovery after Leconte de Lisle was not Baudelaire - although he had in the meantime been inspired by Duparc’s example to set three poems by the author of Les Fleurs du mal - but Verlaine. According to Robert de Montesquiou, it was he who drew the composer’s attention to Verlaine by lending him a copy of the Fêtes galantes. It is difficult to believe, on the other hand, that Fauré was not already well aware of those poems, if only through the settings by Debussy. Anyway, Clair de lune, which was written in 1887, was the first of no fewer than eighteen Fauré songs to words by Verlaine. It is probably also the most inspired, the minuet in the piano part representing the gently rhythmic movement of the masqueraders while the vocal line is shaped entirely according to the natural inflections of the words. And yet, independent as they are, the two elements are clearly aware of each other in their symbolist landscape.

Chanson d’ amour, written five years earlier than Clair de Lune, to words by Armand Silvestre - a fashionable poet of limited inspiration - is not one of the great Fauré mélodies. It is, on the other hand, a song of considerable charm with a discreet counterpoint between the vocal line and, under the broken-chord figuration in the right hand, the bass line of the piano part. Les Roses d’Ispahan, written in 1884 as the third of Fauré’s five settings of words by Leconte de Lisle, is saved from sentimentality by its subtle orientalism, its voluptuous line and, in the middle section, its teasingly erotic modulations.

Marcel Proust, an admirer of many of Fauré’s songs, declared Après un rêve “worthless.” Those many musicians who have profited from arranging it for a variety of instrumental combinations - not least Pablo Casals with his cello version - could not honestly agree with him. Nor can any listener susceptible to seductive melody and tumescent harmony. Written in 1877 just after the painful break of the composer’s engagement with one of Pauline Viardot’s daughters, the song touches from time to time on an emotional truth that transcends a text chosen for its association with the friend who translated it (from an anonymous Tuscan original) rather than its literary merit.

Clair de lune, Op.46, No.2

Chanson d’amour

Les Roses d’Ispahan

Après un rêve

“I wish I had written that,” said Massenet on first hearing Lydia. He might not have been so happy to claim authorship of Fauré’s earlier songs - a handful of drawing-room romances, most of them to words by Victor Hugo - but this was different. Aware no doubt that Leconte de Lisle had written his poem in the (supposed) manner of Gallus, Fauré set the words with appropriately classical restraint and with a both witty and emotive allusion to the Lydian mode in the first line. With that line and its mixture of diatonic and modal intervals, Fauré seems to have found something essential of himself: certainly, it was to echo through his music, most significantly in La bonne Chanson, until as late as the Second Piano Quintet. In Lydia those very personal harmonies have the effect of heightening the intimacy which is further enhanced by the dialogue, modest though it is, between the piano and the voice. Written in 1870, Lydia is also the first of Fauré’s mélodies presenting new melodic material where expression requires it rather than conforming to the all-too predictable strophic construction of the conventional romance.

Fauré’s next important discovery after Leconte de Lisle was not Baudelaire - although he had in the meantime been inspired by Duparc’s example to set three poems by the author of Les Fleurs du mal - but Verlaine. According to Robert de Montesquiou, it was he who drew the composer’s attention to Verlaine by lending him a copy of the Fêtes galantes. It is difficult to believe, on the other hand, that Fauré was not already well aware of those poems, if only through the settings by Debussy. Anyway, Clair de lune, which was written in 1887, was the first of no fewer than sixteen Fauré songs to words by Verlaine. It is probably also the most inspired, the minuet in the piano part representing the gently rhythmic movement of the masqueraders while the vocal line is shaped entirely according to the natural inflections of the words. And yet, independent as they are, the two elements are clearly aware of each other in their symbolist landscape.

Chanson d’ amour, written five years earlier than Clair de Lune, to words by Armand Silvestre - a fashionable poet of limited inspiration - is not one of the great Fauré mélodies. It is, on the other hand, a song of considerable charm with a discreet counterpoint between the vocal line and, under the broken-chord figuration in the right hand, the bass line of the piano part. Les Roses d’Ispahan, written in 1884 as the third of Fauré’s five settings of words by Leconte de Lisle, is saved from sentimentality by its subtle orientalism, its voluptuous line and, in the middle section, its teasingly erotic modulations.

Marcel Proust, an admirer of many of Fauré’s songs, declared Après un rêve “worthless.” Those many musicians who have profited from arranging it for a variety of instrumental combinations - not least Pablo Casals with his cello version - could not honestly agree with him. Nor can any listener susceptible to seductive melody and tumescent harmony. Written in 1877 just after the painful break of the composer’s engagement with one of Pauline Viardot’s daughters, the song touches from time to time on an emotional truth that transcends a text chosen for its association with the friend who translated it (from an anonymous Tuscan original) rather than its literary merit.

“Verlaine is exquisite to set to music,” said Gabriel Fauré, speaking for generations of composers who have been drawn to this most musical of French poets since the Renaissance. 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: “There is a short poem by him, Green, which contains a fresh and melancholy landscape, but this landscape is only atmosphere, ambience. Harmony must be applied to underlining the profound sentiment which the words only sketch.”

An even better illustration of the musical potential of Verlaine’s poetry is Clair de Lune, Fauré’s first Verlaine setting and surely the most inspired of his songs up to the time he wrote it in 1887. The poem (from Fêtes galantes) is a scene in a Watteau painting, the unheard music of its “almost sad” masqueraders waiting to be made perceptible by the floating rhythms and exquisite modal ambiguity of the minuet in Fauré’s piano part. The still atmosphere of En sourdine (also from Fêtes galantes) is broken at the end by the song of the nightingale, a sound which the poet could presume to be familiar to any reader’s ear. So Fauré makes no special point of the birdsong and 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. As for “underlining the profound sentiment” in Green (from Verlaine’s Romance sans paroles), it is done not so much by harmony as by a little motif which enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and which persists in its breathless way to the end of the song. En sourdine and Green, incidentally, are the second and third numbers of Fauré’s Cinq Mélodies de Venise (written partly in Venice and partly in Paris in 1891) where their thematic material gathers additional reverberations as they echo in the Verlaine songs later in the cycle.