Mélodies de Venise

Fauré was certainly in Venice in the summer of 1891 and it was certainly his intention to get to to work on the poems of Verlaine – who, he had recently discovered, “is exquisite to set to music.” But all he actually achieved on his six-week holiday wasMandoline and part of En sourdine. He must, however, have been doing some serious thinking. TheCinq Mélodies de Venise, which he completed on his return to Paris, actually add up to his first song cycle: the poems are ordered to make a loose kind of narrative and the music is designed to form harmonic and thematic links between them.

Mandoline is a delightful song in itself, of course, the piano imitating a plucked mandolin in its accompaniment and later taking over the decorative chromatic line introduced by the voice when it comes to the bird song in the first stanza. En sourdine, accompanied by gently rolling arpeggios and an expressive right-hand that joins the voice in counterpoint in the third line, is another lovely song in its own right. But the two are linked by a little phrase they have in common. In En sourdine that phrase is set in high profile in the piano part at the beginning of the fourth stanza.

In Green the eager sentiment of Verlaine’s verse is reflected in the variety of harmonies applied to a variant of the little phrase common to the first two songs: it enters the piano part at the beginning of the second stanza and persists in its breathless way to the end. Debussy also enjoyed setting Verlaine and, indeed, set all but one of these five texts before Fauré approached them. The exception is À Clymène which, since the poem is one long sentence, is an awkward subject for music. It must have appealed to Fauré, however, for its allusion to the barcarolle, which is an essentially Venetian song form. Certainly, he sets it in a characteristic barcarolle meter and integrates it into his Venetian cycle by incorporating the little phrase in the modal melody first heard in the piano introduction. The unity of the work is confirmed in C’est l’extase where the little phrase reappears prominently in the piano part and relates the whole cycle to this final expression of amorous ecstasy.