Pastorale: Ici, les tendres Oiseaux(1855)

It was Saint-Saëns, one of his teachers at the École Niedermeyer, who introduced Fauré to the Viardot circle. Long-term habitué of the Parisian salons though he was, however, the proportion of duets to solo songs in the Saint-Saëns catalogue - six of the former to well over a hundred of the latter - is scarcely bigger than that of Fauré’s. The earliest, and not the least charming, is his Pastorale to words by Destouches. One of several songs Saint-Saëns dedicated to Marie Reiset (later Vicomtesse de Grandval), whose musicianship he admired so much that he took her on as a composition pupil, it is a highly mellifluous in its vocal writing and characteristically sophisticated in its setting of the text. The reprise of the first stanza, where one voice returns to the first line of the poem while the other is still occupied with the last and where their interlacing lines so prettily recede into the closing “échos,” is a particularly attractive episode.