Programme — Fleur jetée (1884), Les Cloches (c1885), Romance (c1885) …

Fleur jetée (1884)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Les Cloches (c1885)

Romance (c1885)

Beau Soir (c1883)

Charles Gounod (1818-1893)

Bolero (1871)

The least characteristic of Fauré’s songs, Fleur jetée is all the more surprising in that it is a setting of words by Armand Silvestre, a fashionable poet of limited inspiration who appealed to Fauré for his “dreamy indolence.” There is nothing indolent about Fleur jetée. Out of the hundred or so poems Fauré set to music, only one or two others moved him to such an intense expression of violence - the model for which he seems to have found not in French song, which had so far produced nothing like it, but in Schubert’s Erlkönig.

While there is room for discussion about the chronology of Debussy’s early songs, it is difficult to agree with those authorities who allocate the composition of the two Bourget settings, Les Cloches and Romance, to a date as late as 1891. That would make them contemporary with the first set of Fêtes galantes, which are much more mature in style and technique. Les Cloches and Romance, which were published together as Deux Romances in 1891, are no less interesting for that, however. The piano part of Les Cloches is particularly imaginative in the way it sustains bell-like figuration in the right hand and a rising three-note ostinato in the left but only until the end of the second stanza: the transfer of the ostinato in an expressively augmented version to high in the right hand in the third stanza focuses attention on the emotions evoked by the bells rather than their sound. Romance follows a similarly strategy, reserving its most expressive moment to near the end where (on the words Faite d’espoir, d’amour fidèle) the voice at last takes up the melody introduced by the piano in the opening bars.

Beau soir, another Bourget setting, is one of the twenty or so songs Debussy included in a morocco-bound volume of manuscripts he presented to Madame Marie-Blanche Vasnier in 1884. Some commentators have claimed that it was written as early as 1880, before the composer met his amateur-soprano muse and mature mistress, but since the poem was published in Bourget’s Aveux only in 1883 that seems unlikely. Although as a friend of the poet Debussy might have seen the poem before then, the song seems - in comparison with the Banville setting Nuit d’étoiles which we know to have been written in 1880 - too sophisticated for such an early date. One of six Bourget items in the Vasnier songbook, it is subtly unsettling in its harmonies and, as the voice of nature makes its melodious entry in the pianist’s left hand in the third line, discreetly resourceful in its textures.

    Gounod, according to Maurice Ravel, was nothing less than “the true founder of the mélodie in France.” However that may be - and Berlioz is the only other candidate - he also has a claim to be the founder of the French interest in the bolero, even though there was clearly a long way to go between this sociable setting of words by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (librettists of Faust) and the ultimate example written by Ravel fifty-seven years later.