The Faure Song Cycles. Stephen Rumph

in the autograph of “Mai” (see example 1.1). This naïve coda, which follows passages of real harmonic complexity, sets an appropriately arch tone for poems presided over by the spirit of Anacreon.

      EXAMPLE 1.1. Common pentatonic motive in Fauré’s settings from Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule. Based on Fauré, Complete Songs, vol. 1: 1861–1882, ed. Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick (London: Peters Edition, 2015).

      a. “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” m. 8.

      b. “Mai,” m. 34.

      c. “S’il est un charmant gazon,” m. 8.

      “Anacréon aux ondes érotiques” advertises the titillating nature of the genre, but it offered Fauré another clue as well. The protagonist finds the refreshing waters “mi-côte,” midway up the mountain. Similarly, Hugo’s ode arrives midway through Les chants du crépuscule as a respite from his odes to the Greek patriot Canaris or his diatribe against the Chambre des députés. The Anacreontic ode, or odelette as poets from Ronsard to Gautier called it, occupies a middle register between the sublime ode and the lower forms of satire and comedy. In short, an educated reader would not have mistaken the turn to pastoral love poetry in the second half of Les chants du crépuscule as a stylistic regression but would have understood it as a self-conscious modulation between genres.

      Neither should the simplicity of Fauré’s adolescent songs imply a lack of maturity, technique, or ambition. Read within the context of Hugo’s collection, their unpretentious charm suggests a deliberate artistic choice. Fauré’s student songs do not lack in sophistication, but they mask it behind a faux-naïf manner that matches Hugo’s artful simplicity. What distinguishes these songs from truly naïve romances is the keen awareness of Hugo’s poetic craft: in apparently systematic fashion, Fauré concentrated on a different aspect of the poet’s art in each song, whether prosody, syntax, rhetoric, or genre. This astute reading should come as no surprise in a pupil of Niedermeyer’s school who studied literature as part of the curriculum and won prizes in 1858 and 1862.¹⁴ The following discussion, based on the autograph scores, looks closely at Fauré’s craftsmanship in his student songs, and readers should prepare for some detailed technical analysis. It will be time and effort well spent. The analyses of the Hugo settings lay the foundations for the rest of the book in two ways. First, they establish Fauré’s bona fides as a reader, showing the urbane grasp of poetic art in his earliest settings. Second, they show how instead of merely tossing off individual songs, the young composer was already exploring a single idea from different angles, generating a set of songs unified neither by musical features nor by a story line, but by a common poetic ideal.

      But do Fauré’s settings from Les chants du crepuscule in fact constitute a hidden cycle? To answer this question, we must recapture the horizon against which he was writing in the early 1860s. French composers had as yet no native models equivalent to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, or Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. Not until 1866 did Jules Massenet compose Poème d’avril, the first French song cycle with a unified narrative and thematic recollections. Fauré could only look back to Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’éte (1841) and Félicien David’s Les perles d’Orient (1846).¹⁵ Apart from its evocative title, Berlioz’s work coheres solely through its poetic source, Gautier’s La Comédie de la mort, while David’s songs have four different poets and share only an exotic theme. By these standards, Fauré’s five songs would indeed qualify as a cycle had he published them together. The common piano motive certainly argues for a unified conception. The autograph of “Mai” provides another possible clue: Fauré entitled the folio “No. 4/Mai!/à Madame H. Garnier,” suggesting that he originally ordered the five songs from Les chants du crépuscule as a set (“Mai” was indeed the fourth song composed). Unfortunately, the composer’s intentions must remain uncertain, especially without the autograph of “L’aube naît.”

      PROSODY AND RHYTHM

      Fauré’s first song, “Le papillon et la fleur,” does not at first appear to reach very high. The breezy tone, unremarkable harmonies, and waltz accompaniment might tempt us to dismiss the song as a Second Empire bonbon. Yet a closer look reveals a surprising level of craftsmanship. Fauré paid special attention to Hugo’s prosody as he addressed the knotty relationship between French verse and musical meter. Unlike musical meter, French prosody is governed not by accentual pattern but solely by syllable count. The second page of Louis Quicherat’s popular Petit traité de versification française (1850) instructs the student that “since French poetic lines have a fixed number of syllables, one must learn, above all, to count the syllables of the constituent words, or of those that one wishes to include.”¹⁶ Hugo’s quatrains alternate lines of twelve and three syllables (this does not include the final mute e’s, which are not counted although composers did set them):

      Fauré had a striking predilection for such heterometric stanzas in his early songs, including “L’aube naît” (8 + 4 syllables), “S’il est un charmant gazon” (7 + 5), “Tristesse d’Olympio” (12 + 6), “Dans les ruines d’une abbaye” (7 + 3), and “Seule!” (8 + 4).¹⁷ In practice, these early heterometric settings fall rather flat. Fauré struggled with the short lines, which tend to sound padded and inert. Not until “Au bord de l’eau” (1875) and “Nell” (1878) are the uneven lines convincingly integrated within the phrase structure. Nevertheless, Fauré made an imaginative stab at the problem in “Le papillon et la fleur.”

      The waltz topic helped Fauré negotiate this prosodic challenge. The song imitates not only the typical accompaniment of the waltz but also one of its most distinctive melodic features, an offbeat dotted rhythm introduced in m. 11 that permeates the vocal line (see example 1.2). The lilting figure pervades nineteenth-century waltzes and provided the signature rhythm for Ravel’s La valse. Waltzes evoke glittering entertainment, carefree pleasure, Second Empire frivolity—connotations that suit the flighty butterfly. Yet the waltz topic also helped Fauré to integrate the twelve- and three-syllable lines. Fauré fit each pair of unequal lines into a four-bar musical phrase but subdivided the phrases asymmetrically (2½ + 1½ bars), thereby reducing the need to pad the short lines. The waltz topic, with its lilting rhythm, provides the glue to connect the unequal lines: in each strophe, the long lines end with the offbeat rhythm, which the short lines immediately echo (see mm. 12–14 or 20–21). The syncopated figure thus unites Hugo’s unequal lines in the infectious, gyrating rhythm of the waltz.

      EXAMPLE 1.2. Fauré, “Le papillon et la fleur,” mm. 1–25.

      EXAMPLE 1.2. (continued)

      Fauré has suffered much criticism for his apparent mangling of word accent in the early songs.¹⁸ In “Le papillon et la fleur,” for example, the first phrase places the weak second syllables of “pauvre” and “papillon” on strong beats, resulting in “pau-vre” and “pa-pi-llon.” Such critiques, however, assume an equivalence of musical and poetic meter that is antithetical to French prosody. In fact, Fauré seems deliberately to have separated musical and poetic accent in “Le papillon et la fleur.” Each phrase starts on the second eighth note of the bar, ensuring that the first syllable is not stressed. The first two phrases begin with an almost chant-like intonation, and aside from the dotted waltz rhythm, the entire vocal melody consists of a stream of equal eighth notes. Each phrase of “Le papillon et la fleur” begins in medias res and flows smoothly toward the final accented syllable. Fauré’s first crack