The Faure Song Cycles. Stephen Rumph

      The contrapuntal lines depict this union of souls as they crisscross, mirror, and parallel one another. This is no facile pictorialism or isolated effect. Fauré has baked the contrapuntal design into every bar of the song, in both the piano ritornello and vocal strophes.

      Yet the poetry and music of “S’il est un charmant gazon” are hardly soul mates. In fact, poetic and musical syntax are at loggerheads in Fauré’s peculiar setting. Hugo’s poem has a markedly hypotactic structure like that of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre.” Each stanza consists of a single complex sentence that begins with a series of subordinate clauses and does not reach closure until the last two lines:

      The rhyme scheme also has a nested structure, ababcccb, in which the b rhyme encloses the whole stanza. Moreover, Hugo used the same b rhyme (-ose) in all three stanzas, knitting together the entire poem. If the construction of “Mai” suggests headlong enthusiasm, “S’il est un charmant gazon” has the effect of a tautly organized argument.

      In his setting of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” Fauré responded to Hugo’s hypotaxis with music that vividly represents the prolongation of desire—yearning melodic lines, unstable harmonies, a broad and complex phrase structure. His setting of “S’il est un charmant gazon,” on the other hand, could hardly be more complacent. The strophes begin squarely in the tonic with a melody that descends from to like a cadential formula. The harmony sticks doggedly to the tonic, and most remarkably, the antecedent phrase ends with a full cadence. Fauré seems to have been bent on defusing any harmonic or melodic tension, setting Hugo’s tortuous sentences to remarkably bland music.

      Yet Fauré by no means overlooked Hugo’s syntax. Let us turn again to the piano ritornello. The theme is an eight-bar sentence, like the prelude to “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” with a pair of sequential two-bar phrases followed by a four-bar continuation. Each of the three phrases starts on a remote harmony with the melody poised on the dissonant seventh degree. The first phrase begins on a startling V⁷ of V and moves elliptically to I⁶. This uneasy resolution is undercut by the second phrase, which begins a fifth higher on vi⁷ and resolves to ii. The third phrase ratchets the tension still higher, rising another fifth and beginning abruptly on V of vi before working back around to the tonic. The piano thus supplies the harmonic tension and sense of prolonged resolution absent from the vocal part. In fact, there is a precise parallel between the harmonic structure of Fauré’s eight-bar ritornello and the syntax of Hugo’s eight-line stanzas. Both consist of a single complex sentence that begins with three unstable clauses and reaches closure in the final two bars/lines.

      A strange division of labor! The piano ritornello realizes Hugo’s rhetorical structure while the vocal strophes blithely ignore the poet’s complicated syntax. In fact, other than the shared motivic and contrapuntal features, the ritornello and strophes seem to belong to different songs. The ritornello strikes a serious tone with its strict four-part writing, rhapsodic gestures, and espressivo marking. The melody of the strophes, on the other hand, exudes a naïve, almost folk-like simplicity, while the staccato accompaniment evokes the modest chanson genre, the realm of serenades, barcarolles, and drinking songs. Not only do the vocal strophes ignore Hugo’s syntax, but they fit poorly with the word accents. Of all Fauré’s early songs, “S’il est un charmant gazon” is plagued by the most discrepancies of text-setting across sources, including editions. It almost seems as if Fauré had grafted Hugo’s poem onto the melody of a discarded song . . .

      Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air. “New words to an old tune.” Hugo’s title, we recall, hints at an anonymous folksong beneath the new poem. Fauré seems to have taken the title seriously. His naïve vocal melody sounds very much like a vieil air to which new words have been awkwardly fitted. The sophisticated piano ritornello, on the other hand, suggests the perspective of the modern poet as he toys with his folk artifact. Given the carefully fashioned musical connections between the piano and vocal parts, it seems entirely plausible that the composer intended this duality. It is an ingenious conception that should banish forever the notion of Fauré as a naïve reader.

      Yet there is still more involved in this counterpoint of piano and voice. Fauré has staged a dialogue between national styles. The ritornello is pure German Romanticism, lifted from the pages of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, while the strophes tap the limpid vocalism of Fauré’s native tradition. As “S’il est un charmant gazon” demonstrates, Fauré did not need to graduate from the romance to the mélodie. His student songs already draw the two genres into a dialogue that engages stylistic register, social function, and national identity. Fauré clearly intended to publish these songs, since he approached Victor Hugo in 1864 for the rights to the poems.²⁷ We may thus view Fauré’s dialogue of genres as his fashioning of a compositional voice as he prepared to set himself before the public eye. The early Hugo settings align him with the traditions of the salon romance, even as they bid for the prestige of the Germanic mélodie. They make a remarkable debut for the composer who more than any other would shape the course of French art song into the twentieth century.

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      Ascending Parnassus

      Poème d’un jour, op. 21

      Fauré’s first song cycle has always fared better with the public than with critics. He composed the popular Poème d’un jour in 1878, thirteen years before he embarked on his six mature cycles. The three settings of poet Charles Grandmougin trace a brief love affair from infatuation (“Rencontre”) to rejection (“Toujours”) to resigned acceptance (“Adieu”). Musically, the songs cohere through a network of shared motives, piano figurations, and harmonic structures. The keys of Fauré’s autograph also follow a logical tonal plan from D♭ major to F♯ minor to G♭ major—enharmonically, a V-i progression followed by a major-minor shift. (The tonal scheme is even clearer in the 1880 first edition, which transposes the autograph keys to B major, E minor, and E major.) Yet despite the evident care that Fauré devoted to Poème d’un jour, critics have rated the work as little more than a fashionable pastiche. Vladimir Jankélévitch found no musical integration but only “the unity of a sort of sentimental biography.”¹ As Robert Orledge remarked less charitably, “The only common factor of the three op. 21 songs is their relative mediocrity.”² The obvious connection between the romantic narrative and Fauré’s broken engagement of 1877 has also tempted scholars to collapse