The Faure Song Cycles. Stephen Rumph
in The Musical Quarterly and Journal of the American Musicological Society.
Raina Polivka has been a wonderfully supportive and helpful editor. I thank her, Madison Wetzell, Jeffrey Wyneken, Emilia Thiuri, and the rest of the staff at University of California Press for another effortless publication venture. I am grateful to Robert Geiger as well for the musical engraving.
My heartfelt thanks go out to all my friends and family, both living and departed. The love and wisdom you have shared with me means more than I can express.
I owe a special debt to Joseph Kerman, my Berkeley adviser whose magnum opus The Beethoven Quartets inspired my title. His deep, passionate, and humane engagement with musical art works remains an undimmed beacon, and I gratefully dedicate this book to his memory.
Finally, to the One who gives both life and meaning be all the praise. To quote Fauré’s magnum opus, “Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion.”
1
Romancing the mélodie
A Hugo Cycle?
Fauré’s first song cycle dates from 1878, but our story begins much earlier at the École Niedermeyer. Fauré’s student songs, written between 1861 and 1864, already give a taste of the cyclic impulse that would come to dominate his songwriting. This premonition does not appear in musical devices, whether key schemes, thematic recollections, or recurring motives; these features come and go across his seven song cycles. Nor can we locate it in a narrative, for three of those cycles lack any story line. The telltale element in Fauré’s adolescent songs is a common poetic vision, a reading that transcends the individual author and poems and engages deeper artistic concerns. As in his later song cycles, Fauré grasped poetry not merely as a source of evocative texts but as a nexus of technical and aesthetic issues bearing on his historical moment. And the issue that unites his earliest songs is genre.
Fauré’s student songs demonstrate his lifelong penchant for focusing on a single poet, indeed, a single collection. All six have texts by Victor Hugo and five come from Les chants du crépuscule (1835). Fauré mined Hugo’s volume for “Le papillon et la fleur,” “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” “Mai,” “L’aube naît,” and “S’il est un charmant gazon” (published as “Rêve d’amour”). “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” remained unpublished and “L’aube naît” has vanished entirely, although it is mentioned alongside the other songs in a letter from 1864.1 Fauré set yet another poem from Les chants du crépuscule, “L’aurore s’allume,” toward the end of the decade.
In studying Fauré’s adolescent songs, we immediately face the question of genre. No single category existed for French art song in the 1860s equivalent to the Austro-Germanic Lied. Since the late eighteenth century, the native romance had dominated song production in France. Elegant and unpretentious, the romance featured sentimental or characteristic texts set in strophic form with an unobtrusive piano accompaniment.2 During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new genre emerged alongside the romance, the highbrow mélodie. Inspired by Schubert’s Lieder, composers of mélodies gave the piano a more independent role, experimented with nonstrophic forms, and enriched the expressive palette. Guided by Frits Noske’s classic study La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc (1954), histories of French song have tended to trace an evolutionary narrative in which the mélodie inevitably usurps the place of the romance and reigns supreme after 1870.3
Fauré himself seems to ratify this narrative in a letter from 1870. The composer agrees to send an old schoolmate “the little mélodie that you asked for” (most likely “Lydia”) as well as “a copy of my romance ‘S’il est un charmant gazon.’ ”4 The letter appears to cordon off Fauré’s student songs from later and more ambitious compositions like “Lydia” or his three Baudelaire settings. And indeed, his adolescent Hugo songs are lightweight by comparison, with their pastoral texts, simple accompaniments, and strophic form. Fauré’s critics have found it easy to follow his lead and retrace the history of French song across his early career. Charles Kœchlin brushed past the Hugo settings, dismissing one as “slightly ‘romance,’ ” and rejoiced at Fauré’s emancipation from strophic form.5 Jean-Michel Nectoux entitled his fine chapter on the early songs “From the romance to the mélodie,” while Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick hailed Fauré’s “transition from the romance to the mélodie” during the 1860s.6
Like all evolutionary narratives, however, this account of Fauré’s early songwriting downplays the role of the historical agent. It ignores the way in which the composer himself understood and navigated the genres available to him. The evolution of French song into the mélodie was by no means preordained in the early 1860s. Composers continued to label songs both romance and mélodie until the end of the decade, designations that reflected real differences in form and style.7 Nor did Fauré lack for Germanic models of song composition during his student years. His tutor Camille Saint-Saëns was a champion of Liszt, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, while his teacher and headmaster Louis Niedermeyer had virtually founded the mélodie genre with his 1820 song “Le lac.” Niedermeyer cast Alphonse de Lamartine’s elegiac poem in the form of an operatic scène in which three stanzas of obbligato recitative introduce the lyric set piece, three strophes entitled “Romance.” As Saint-Saëns attested, Niedermeyer “broke the mold of the tired old French romance and, inspired by the beautiful poems of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, created a new genre, a superior art analogous to the German Lied.”8
Fauré’s setting of Hugo’s “Tristesse d’Olympio” (Les rayons et les ombres), written around 1865, demonstrates how easily he could adopt this elevated style. His song emulates Niedermeyer’s “Le lac” just as Hugo’s poem emulates Lamartine’s elegy. A recitative-like Grave built over an operatic lamento bass leads into two stormy strophes with a notably free phrase structure. This serious mélodie, written just a year or two after “S’il est un charmant gazon,” muddies the image of a linear evolution from romance to mélodie. Indeed, Fauré circled back to his lighter manner in his next Hugo settings, “Dans les ruines d’une abbaye” and “L’aurore”—as one would expect from their lighter pastoral texts.
Yet Fauré perhaps learned a deeper lesson about genre from “Le lac.” In Niedermeyer’s song the young composer found a strophic romance, labeled as such, embedded within a mélodie of Teutonic scope and gravitas. Niedermeyer’s song does not renounce the romance but deploys it artfully within the larger form of the operatic scène. Dramaturgically, the romance becomes a site of memory, the timeless lyric moment in which the bereaved poet finds consolation. Fauré’s “Tristesse d’Olympio” frames the romance even more clearly as a retrospective utterance. The introductory Grave recounts the poet’s return to the site of his lost love, ending as the poet begins his lament:
Il se sentit le cœur triste comme une tombe,
Alor il s’écria:
His heart felt as sad as a tomb,
So he cried out:
The following strophes render the poet’s elegy, enclosed within quotation marks. The strophic romance again provides a locus of memory and nostalgia, a role that reflects its historical position as a conservative, backward-looking genre.
The evolutionary view of Fauré’s early songwriting, then, is not merely dubious history. It also leads to an impoverished reading of his early songs. As “Tristesse d’Olympio” demonstrates, Fauré did not abandon the romance in favor of the mélodie but combined both in a sophisticated dialogue. And it was Hugo’s poetry that inspired this play between genres. To read Fauré’s songs in this manner requires that we view genres as more than taxonomic categories. Musical genres function instead as codes shared by composers, performers, and listeners, which activate expectations and shape the reception of individual works. Indeed, a composer can evoke multiple genres within the same work to produce a complex, resonant utterance.9 This chapter explores the dialogue of genres within Fauré’s surviving songs from Les chants du crépuscule, showing how he manipulated the generic codes of the romance and mélodie