Mandoline

Clair de lune

Prison

Green

L’Hiver a cessé

“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. 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 but effectively dramatic reaction to the poet’s bitter self-recriminations (published in Sagesses) in prison in Brussels after his attack on Arthur Rimbaud in 1873. Set, as it happens, in the relative major of the previous song, Green (from Cinq Mélodies de Venise) is a contrastingly fresh landscape, its eager sentiment reflected in the variety of harmonies applied to 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.

L’hiver a cessé is the last item in another Verlaine cycle, La Bonne Chanson, which Fauré completed in 1894 after long reflection on how to order the eight songs he had written in the previous year and how to conclude the series. While it acts as a kind of recapitulation to the cycle, in its spring-time exuberance and its more reflective ending it is scarcely less effective as a conclusion in another context.