Nearly thirty years ago, introducing a first record of Fauré songs for the same publisher (but not the same label), I worried about the tenacious lack of recognition of which this music was the victim, particularly the late works, the greatest. Today, I have to accept the evidence : Fauré is and shall remain a composer for the happy few and, paraphrasing François Couperin writing about his unlce Louis, "he shall always meet the taste of those whose tase is exquisite". The reasons for this are all too clear. Listen to Emile Vuillermoz : "His writing is an essentially intelligent one. It proceeds by allusions, by bringing things together, by make-believe, by bold grazings, by witty substitutions, by false exits, by shufflings and by jugglings". And Louis Aguettant writes: "Fauré's music is the place of reconciled opposites : is it not the natural and the rare, refinement and simplicity, charm and power the relish of detail and living unity? In this bundle of balances, we recognize classicsm."
For sure, Fauré's greatness is not of the shattering kind: its discretion, its modesty, its mildness and, yes, its charm have alas masked its real proportions. A similar fate also happened to Mozart, who never solieits the listener, who does him violence even less, but who only gives himself to him who approaches him with a loving soul. The extraordmary novelty of Fauré's language, above ail his harmony, never forces our attention through revolutionary shock, but only through the graduaI habit of affectionate and diligent frequentation. Unpolished tempers do not find in Fauré's music the food to satisfy their love of the spectacular, but neither does It fulfil the needs orthose who are fond of violent passions. Fauré saw music as the means "to soar as high as possible above that which is", and 1 think 1 spotlight the deep reason for the lack of understanding from whlch he suffers by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde: "the dislike of Fauré is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass ...".
Fauré has left us about one hundred songs, far more than any other major French composer, even Debussy having written less than eighty, juvenilia included. Three collections group the near total of that output up to 1904 (the earliest songs go back to ca. 1865, when the composer was only twenty), the exception being the great cycle of La Bonne chanson. High maturity is reached with the third collection, beginning with opus 51, and from which we have selected opus 58, 76 and 83. After 1904, except for a very few single songs, Fauré's production as a song writer consists in four cycles: La Chanson d'Eve, Le Jardin clos (whose title alone symbolizes his whole art, as does that of one of the single songs, Le Don silel1cieux), both after poems by Charles van Lerberghe, and lastly Mirages and L'Horizon chimérique, both recorded here.
The VENETIAN SONGS, opus 58 - The five Venetian Songs only owe their name to the place where they were started: Fauré, discovering Venice for the first time in June 1891, sketched the first two songs there, but only completed the cycle by September, back in Paris. It was sung for the first time by Maurice Bagès at the Société Nationale, the 2nd April 1892. Verlaine's poetry, which Fauré had discovered two years before with Clair de lune (opus 46 No.2) gives the cycle. its unity of inspiration. The texts of Nos. 1, 2 and 4 come from the Fêtes galantes, the other two from the Romances sans paroles. Except for A Clymène (No.4), they had all been set before by the young Debussy. Let us now penetrate into the most intimate recesses of that microcosm of dreamy nostalgy and delicate irony.
MANDOLINE sets up the scenery, both of a serenade and a slightly obsolete madrigal, by suggesting the meanderings of vain and charming ghosts in the shade of Versailles' groves, a Versailles whose all too diurnal order Verlaine has cunningly shaded off. To the gentle and indulgent Fauré, Debussy had opposed a more biting and lively tarantella: both composers, each in his own way, remain faithful to the poet.
With EN SOURDINE [With mutes on] Verlaine inspired both to a highly individual masterpiece. Whereas Bilitis and Mélisande can be recognized at the horizon of Debussy's song, Fauré's opens prosfects towards the most bewitching and subtle of his Nocturnes yet to be written, signing the piece with the paraph of that octave drop which only belongs to him.
GREEN is the offering of gushing youth rejoicing in life, whereas Debussy had been more supple in his word setting, but less direct in his expression.
A CLYMENE is a love madrigal of adorable preciosity, but wrapped in a somewhat unreal lunar halo.
Finally, C'EST L'EXTASE expresses the intimate complicity of gratified love with a warm and tender fervour very different from Debussy's more passionate transports.
LA BONNE CHANSON, opus 61 - In 1870, Paul Verlaine had written a cycle of twenty-one poems for his bride Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. In front of this pure and totally immature young girl (and we know the wedding rapidly sank into tragedy, the poet's basic homosexuality having reemerged with a vengeance when he met the adolescent Arthur Rimbaud), Verlaine feels shy and puzzled, his muse becoming tender and naive. When Fauré chose nine of these poems, altering their order for the sake of dramatic and musical architecture (he set, in this order, Nos. 8, 4, 6, 20, 15, 5, 19, 17 and 21), he made them to his most ardently passionate song cycle, his most extraverted and impetuous, which by the way accounts for its relative popularity, being one of his few better-known works. This is because he transferred into it all the passionate love he then felt for Emma Bardac, Debussy's future second wife (the mother of Verlaine's transient wife had been Debussy's first piano teacher : how strange and fascinating the way the existences of Fauré and Debussy keep crossing each other's without ever meeting!).
The composition of the cycle, begun with Donc ce sera par un clair jour d'été the 9th August 1892, did not follow the order of the pieces (Nos. 1,4, 6 and 7 were written in 1892, Nos. 2,3,5 and 8 in 1893) and was completed only in February 1894 with L'Hiver a cessé (No. 9), and this last piece cost the composer such hesitations as to delay its delivery to the publisher until September. Meanwhile the first (private) performance had already taken place fhe 25th April in the drawing-room of Madame Lemaire, Maurice Bages being accompanied by the composer. The first public performance was almost one year later, the 20th April 1895, with Jeanne Remacle, and again the composer at the keyboard, at the Societe Nationale. Audiences and critics alike were baffled by the novelty of the musical idiom, and Marcel Proust was one of the very few immediate admirers, whereas Saint-Saëns thought his Friend Fauré "had gone completely mad' .
Very soon, the work's analysts identified as many as five or even six recurrent themes, giving the cycle its structural unity, and the composer, who always rather trusted his intuition, reluctantly confirmed. These themes are discrete, almost always hidden within the piano accompaniment, their significance is purely musical, not dramatic, and their identification can be dispensed with in a short introduction such as this one. Let it also be remembered that Fauré, answering a request, provided an arrangement with string quartet in 1898, but that he definitely disowned it after a single performance in London.
UNE SAINTE EN SON AUREOLE transfigurs the affected angelism of the poem into 'a limpid and serene pentaphonic diatonicism, above an accompaniment of regular quavers. The "horn's golden notes" (they are F fiats) enhance the second strophe with some dissonances. The opening A-flat major is back at "fierte tendre" (tender prIde). The gait remains moderately lively, and the subtle harmonies, with their swan-like candour and their mother-of-pearl shadings, lead to the unobtrusive conclusive Lydian fourth, Fauré's fingerprint.
PUISQUE L'AUBE GRANDIT [Since dawn rises] presents us with its melodic and harmonic enchantment in a gushing of adorable freshness, above its accompaniment of arpeggios as swift as the bubbling of a brook, througn the unseizable race of its modulations, finally falling back into its home-key of G with perfect spontaneity.
The gait becomes slower, but also firmer in LA LUNE BLANCHE [The white moon], though the harmonies remain as flowing and the modulations as unpredictable as ever. The so typically Fauréan dropping octave on "bien-aimée" is answered by the rising octave (followed by a dropping fifth) on the closing words "c'est l'heure exquise": a calm, peaceful, ethereal ending.
True to its words, J'ALLAIS PAR DES CHEMINS PERFIDES [I walked along faithless paths] is a fast and restless piece, wifh its tortuous modulations and undefined tonality, till it reaches its joyful final resolution in F-sharp major.
J'AI PRESQUE PEUR EN VERITE [I am almost scared, to tell the truth] unfolds in a lively and passionate tempo, above a panting accompaniment with Schumannesque syncopations, right till its final clearing. Admire the two vocalizings, so different, on 'Je vous aime", more complex and adorned, and on "Je t'aime", more ardent and soaring.
AVANT QUE TU NE T'EN AILLES [Before you leave] gradually shades off the antitheses to be found in both halves of each strophe: in the first two, the opening's calm serenity contrasts with the dazzling and nimble joy of the quails and larks. Then this joy gradually extends to the whole music, everything being carried away towards the final triumph of the sun.
The bubbling accompaniment of the opening of DONC CE SERA PAR UN CLAIR JOUR D'ÉTÉ [Thus it shall be during a bright summer day] first recalls that of Puisque l'allbe grandit, then, as the evening falls with the third strophe, the music calms and slows down towards the great vesperal relaxation.
Serenity and happiness again dominate N'EST CE PAS?, but still enlivened by the accompaniment's modulating vivacity. Towards the end, the music soars in the ecstasy of Fauré's ascending sequences, then it gently falls back, in happy fulfilment, on the merodic drop of the final interrogation "N'est-ce pas ?", symmetrical of the opening one.
L'HIVER A CESSE [Winter has ceased], the climax and synthesis of the whole cycle, opens on a merry dotted bird-call, a fairly extended piano introduction into which the voice then steals in in a perfectly natural way. This delightful joy gives way towards the end to the collected, tender and concentrated gravity of the invocation "O toi que decore", the slow and calm instrumental epilogue prolonging its resonance in order to better relish its intimate happiness.
TWO SONGS, opus 76 - They are among the latest of the third collection, having being written respectively the 22nd August 1897 (first performance the 4th November by Emile Engel) and in early September (first performance at the Societe Nationale the 30th April 1898 by Thérèse Roger).
LE PARFUM IMPERISSABLE, setting a sonnet by Leconte de Lisle, is one of Fauré's supreme masterpieces, and one closest to his late style, with its pure melodic line of ideal perfection, enshrined in choice and distilled harmonies of acute refinement, whose excursions towards the remotest tonal horizons never allow us to forget the gentle tyranny of E-major.
ARPEGE, on a poem by Albert Samain, an ultimate glance back towards the more brilliant manner of the second collection, offers us a light, and wilful ride, racing after a happiness one guesses to be unseizable.
TWO SONGS, opus 83 - Here the high opus number is misleading, for those two songs were written as early as the 4th and 17th December 1894 : they even had a first and rather confidential publication in 1896 as opus 51 (!).
PRISON is Fauré's last setting of Verlaine: their meeting lasted a mere six years ! This celebrated poem, as remote from the ironical grace of the Fêtes galantes as from the sparkling joy of La Bonne chanson, inspired Fauré to one of his last utterances of harsh and earthly sorrow. Henceforth, he would soar higher and higher towards serenity, though not without poignant late revolts, as in the last two Nocturnes or in L'Horizon chimérique.
SOIR [Evening], setting a poem by Albert Samain, is a nocturne of extraordinary harmonic and modulating wealth, unfolding in a spellbound atmosphere at the same time ardent and chaste.
MIRAGES, opus 113 - The brief cycle Mirages (better translated as Delusions), Fauré's penultimate, was the product of the earliest of the six summers (his last) which he spent in the house of his friends the Maillots in Annecy-le-Vieux. It was written fairly quickly, between the 18th July and the 19th August 1919. As a performer, Fauré thought of Mad eleine Grey, and indeed she premiered the work at the Société Nationale the following 27th December, accompanied by the composer. The dedicatee, however, was Mad ame Gabriel Hanotaux, whose husband had acquainted Fauré with the poet, the Baronne Renée de Brimont, who was also the confidant and champion of the poet O.V. de L. Milosz, who called her "a living torch". But there is nothing of that fire to be found in the collection of sixty poems published in that same year 1919 under the title Mirages, divided into two sections: De l'Eau et des Paysages (Of Water and Landscapes), from which Fauré borrowed Nos. 1, 9 and 23, and Des Songes el des Paroles (Of Dreams and Words), of which Dansellse is No. 27. It must be stressed that Fauré's music rises very high above the mediocrity of those poems, imbued wi th a very "fin-de-siècle" weariness : Danseuse is the only of the four where the word ennui (boredom) does not appear!
In CYGNE SUR L'EAU [Swan on the water], after the placid calm of the first strophe, the watery mirror begins to ripple and to glitter under an imperceptible breath at stropne 2, when the swan's swimming takes its fligflt towards the delusive offing, reaching its clinlax at the end of strophe 3. The next one brakes and cuts the flight's dash, taking us back to the slack and resigned quietness of the last strophe, the end of the delusion of this abortive departure (which L'Horizon chimérique shall sing on the contrary with the virile accents of painful revolt).
REFLETS DANS L'EAU [Reflections in the water] is the silky and opalescent placidity of a vain serenity. Strophes 3 and 4 try to stir up languor through ascending progress ions, but it tails back in the nex t two (even the "gallop of the Ægypans" gives birth to neither motion nor reachon). At the beginning of strophe 7, at the moment of the temptation of suicide, the water suddenly grows heavier and more glaucous, whilst the motion stops (a very rare occurence with Fauré!), staked out by two silences. Then the water again closes up mysteriously, back to its sleek opening indifference.
A piece of shadow and mys tery, JARDIN NOCTURNE is if possible even more impenetrable in its transparence, its nudity even more secret. This is the impalpable realm of the "I don't know what" and the "Almost nothing", so dear to Vladimir Jankelevitch.
DANSEUSE, lastly, offers the obsessive whirling, on its stubborn dotted rhythm that rouses us with desires as vague as they are unquenchable, of some odalisque with neat and indifferent gestures, her face impenetrable in its congealed beauty. This last of Fauré's dances is the dance of a ghost at once graceful and disquietening, whom any life of the heart or even of the senses seems to have deserted.
L'HORIZON CHIMERIQUE, opus 118 - The old master's last vocal work was written in his seventy-seventh year, during the autumn of 1921 . Its dedicatee Charles Panzera premiered it at the Societe Nationale the 13th May 1922, accompanied by Magdeleine Panzera-Baillot. We have reached the highest and last summit of nearly sixty years of vocal production. Four poems of lofty perfection, the work of Jean de la Ville de Mirmont, a young poet who fell in the battlefields of the war, have found the most direct and brotherly response in the unchangeably young and unsa tiated heart of the deaf and bent, sclerosis- stricken old man who could have been his grand-father. Foresaking the whiteness of the summits already reached, Fauré here expresses a very human longing for inaccessible youth. Poet and musician here vibrate in unison. Facing dea th, they fight it with similar aspirations, a same revolt, a same virile warmth, only to finally yield to a same bitter resignation. The magician of the thirteen Barcarolles and of so many tonal seascapes once again finds himself facing his favourite element.
LA MER EST INFINIE, heaved by the mighty spraylashed surge of the heart, that surge that reason cannot and will not know, invites us to a sailing towards otherwordly shores (JE ME SUIS EMBARQUÉ, I sailed out).
DIANE, SÉLÉNÉ, an absolu te wounder of Fauréan concentration and nud ity, is the revolt born from th e opposition between the inhuman and icy serenity of the moon gliding th.rough the dizzy sidereal infinite and the all-too-human suffering.
VAISSEAUX, NOUS vous AURONS AIMÉS EN PURE PERTE [Ships, we shall have loved you at a pure loss], lastfy, is the illusion fallen back, the bitterness of the flights in which we shall take no more part, the sudden reality of d ea fness, of the icy numbness of old age. And those "great unfulfilled departures" finally break down on that octave drop we know so well, which here discloses its ultimate meaning.
HARRY HALBREICH
Brussels, December 1965
Arolla, July 1994
Marinkyo's School > Gabriel Fauré > Harry Halbreich > Gabriel Fauré / The Songs
