The Faure Song Cycles. Stephen Rumph
met you,
I feel my stubborn torment less today;
O tell me, will you be the unexpected woman
And the ideal dream I pursued in vain?
O passerby with the sweet eyes, will you then be the lover
That restores happiness to the isolated poet?
And will you shine upon my restored soul
Like the native sky upon an exile’s heart?
Your wild sadness, so like my own,
Loves to watch the sunset on the sea!
Before its immensity your ecstasy awakens,
And the charm of the evenings is precious to your dear soul;
A mysterious and sweet sympathy
Already enchains me to you like a living tie,
And my soul trembles, invaded by love,
And my heart cherishes you without knowing you well!
The sentimentality and confessional tone, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, belong to an earlier age, as do the bland commonplaces—isolated poet, ocean sunset, ideal dream. The leisurely alexandrines also lack the concision prized by the Parnassians. In fact, the poetic meter grows more concentrated across Poème d’un jour, shifting to octosyllables in “Toujours” and ending with alternating eight- and two-syllable lines in “Adieu.” Fauré’s musical forms follow the same path: the cycle begins with the loose strophes of the salon romance, moves to a modified da capo, and ends with a perfectly symmetrical da capo form.
The negligent lyricism of Grandmougin’s “poète isolé” finds an analogue in the harmonic structure of “Rencontre” (see example 2.2). Let us begin with a small detail: Fauré’s melody ends with a retrograde of its first three notes, D♭-C-B♭. The line descends as
Tonal instability runs deeper still in the first half of Fauré’s strophes. The four phrases form an ABABʹ period, but Fauré has deformed the harmonic structure. The antecedent does not reach a half cadence in the tonic but ends instead with a half cadence in F minor, the mediant (m. 6). The consequent begins in the tonic, but it also drifts away and reaches a full cadence in F minor (mm. 11–12). The first half of “Rencontre” persistently evades the tonic, gravitating toward keys a third above or below.
In the second half of the strophe, as the poet addresses the beloved, the drooping melody reverses direction and climbs to a triumphant climax. The first phrase surges to the upper tonic twice then breaks through this ceiling to reach high F (m. 15). The second phrase repeats the pattern in sequence, pushing twice against F before reaching the climactic A♭ above a cathartic I6/4 chord. Meanwhile, the harmony returns to the secure orbit of the tonic. The first phrase reaches a firm half cadence in D♭ (mm. 15–16), answered by the emphatic final cadence and its inverted
EXAMPLE 2.2. Tonal ambivalence in Fauré, “Rencontre,” Poème d’un jour, op. 21, mm. 1–21.
EXAMPLE 2.2. (continued)
EXAMPLE 2.2. (continued)
Yet this victory has a false note. There is an operatic bravura foreign to Fauré’s customary reserve in this vocal climax. “Rencontre” unabashedly indulges the vocalist, showcasing the singing subject. As Marshall Brown put it, “Fauré reveals absorption in a vision as self-absorption.”27 The second song, “Toujours,” will end on an even more flamboyant high note as the opera house fully invades the salon. The vehemence of both songs betrays a lack of control, as if the poet can only express himself through sheer rhetorical force.
“Toujours” intensifies every disruptive element of the first song as the rejected poet hurls reproaches at his unfaithful lover:
| Vous me demandez de ma taire, | You ask me to be quiet, |
| De fuir loin de vous pour jamais, | To flee far from you forever |
| Et de m’en aller, solitaire, | And to depart alone |
| Sans me rappeler qui j’aimais! | Without thinking of the one I loved! |
| Demandez plutôt aux étoiles | Rather ask the stars |
| De tomber dans l’immensité, | To fall from the sky, |
| À la nuit de perdre ses voiles, | Or the night to lift its veils, |
| Au jour de perdre sa clarté, | Or the day to lose its brightness! |
| Demandez à la mer immense | Rather ask the immense ocean |
| De dessécher ses vastes flots, | To dry up its vast waves, |
| Et, quand les vents sont en démence, | And the madly raging winds |
| D’apaiser ses sombres sanglots! | To calm their dismal sobbing! |
| Mais n’espérez pas que mon âme | But do not hope that my soul |
| S’arrache à ses âpres douleurs | Can ever tear itself from its sorrow |
| Et se dépouille de sa flame | And shed its flames |
| Comme le printemps de ses fleurs! | Like the spring sheds its flowers! |
The suave arpeggios of “Rencontre” return here as violent waves, crashing on the weak beats. The melody again begins with an impetuous double upbeat but now stretched into emphatic quarter notes. The harmony of “Toujours” also follows the same wayward path as “Rencontre,” plunging immediately to the submediant, D major.
Indeed, the third relations that ruffled the surface of “Rencontre” usurp the tonal structure itself in “Toujours.” The middle section is the most audacious harmonic passage Fauré had yet composed and will require a detour into some rather complex technical analysis (see example 2.3). In Grandmougin’s second and third stanzas, the poet unleashes a barrage of similes whose hyperbolic rhetoric reverberates in Fauré’s harmony. The passage rotates through a complete minor-third cycle, rising a third with each new poetic conceit: after a half cadence in F♯ minor, the passage modulates to A major (m. 12), C major (m. 16), D♯ major (m. 20), and back to F♯ minor