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 in response to Hugo’s poetry. Our study of the student songs will in turn prepare for the following chapters by demonstrating the sophisticated grasp of poetic art that guided Fauré from his earliest efforts as a songwriter.
AN ANACREONTIC CYCLE
In Les chants du crépuscule, as in the preceding Feuilles d’automne, Hugo grappled with the new energies unleashed by the July Revolution of 1830. His title plays on the twin meanings of crépuscule, both dawn and dusk, to express the uncertainty of the times. As he mused in the preface, “Society waits to see if what lies on the horizon will be fully illuminated or whether it will be absolutely extinguished.”10 The cluster of texts set by Fauré begins midway through the thirty-nine poems of Hugo’s collection (see the list of poems). An envoi to the Feuilles d’automne (no. 18) closes the first half, which consists of political odes and meditations. “L’aurore s’allume” (no. 20) heralds a new dawn, lit not by human events but by the eternal truths of nature:
| Livre salutaire | Salutary book |
| Où le cœur s’emplit! | Where the heart is replenished! |
| Où tout sage austère | Where every austere sage |
| Travaille et pâlit! | Labors and grows pale! |
| Dont le sens rebelle | Whose recalcitrant meaning |
| Parfois se révèle! | Sometimes reveals itself! |
| Pythagore épèle | Pythagoras deciphers |
| Et Moïse lit! | And Moses reads! |
The short five-syllable lines signal a shift to the lighter chanson genre. Indeed, the succeeding poems, from which Fauré drew his song texts, abandon politics for pastoral verse and meditations inspired by nature. Fauré set nos. 22, 23, 25, 27, and 31, and later “L’aurore s’allume” itself.
Between the two halves of the volume, preceding “L’aurore s’allume,” comes a short ode to Anacreon (no. 19), the ancient Ionian poet of wine, love, and song:
Anacréon, poète aux ondes érotiques
Qui filtres du sommet des sagesses antiques,
Et qu’on trouve à mi-côte alors qu’on y gravit,
Clair, à l’ombre, épandu sur l’herbe qui revit,
Tu me plais, doux poète au flot calme et limpide!
Quand le sentier qui monte aux cimes est rapide,
Bien souvent, fatigués du soleil, nous aimons
Boire au petit ruisseau tamisé par les monts!
Anacreon, poet of the erotic waters,
You who filter ancient wisdom from the summit,
Which we find midway up the mountain as we climb,
Bright in the shade, diffused over the reviving grass,
You please me, sweet poet of the calm and limpid stream!
When the path that ascends to the heights is steep,
How often, weary from the sun, we love
To drink from the little brook filtered by the mountains!
Anacreon’s modern reception had peaked during the eighteenth century. A handful of surviving odes (now known to be wrongly attributed) were translated and imitated and gained currency in France through Pierre de Ronsard’s sixteenth-century versions. Most recently, Charles-Marie René Leconte de Lisle had translated nine Anacreontic odes in his Poèmes antiques (1852), the last of which Fauré would set in 1890 (“La rose”). The author and critic Léo Joubert reviewed Leconte de Lisle’s translations in 1863, giving an intriguing description of the Anacreontic genre:
| Contents of Victor Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule (1835), with dates of Fauré’s settings |
| Préface |
| Prélude |
| 1. Dicté après juillet 1830 |
| 2. À la colonne |
| 3. Hymne |
| 4. Noces et festins |
| 5. Napoléon II |
| 6. Sur le bal de l’Hotel-de-Ville |
| 7. O Dieu! Si vous avez la France sous vos ailes |
| 8. À Canaris |
| 9. Seule au pied de la tour d’où sort la voix du maître |
| 10. À l’homme qui a livré une femme |
| 11. A M. le D. d’O. |
| 12. À Canaris |
| 13. Il n’avait pas vingt ans. Il avait abusé |
| 14. Oh! N’insultez jamais une femme qui tombe! |
| 15. Conseil |
| 16. Le grand homme vaincu peut perdre en un instant |
| 17. À Alphonse Rabbe |
| 18. Envoi des Feuilles d’automne à Madame *** |
| 19. Anacréon, poète aux ondes érotiques |
| 20. L’aurore s’allume (c. 1868–70) |
| 21. Hier, la nuit d’été, qui nous prêtait ses voiles |
| 22. Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air (1864) |
| 23. Autre chanson (c. 1862–64) |
| 24. Oh! pour remplir de moi ta rêveuse pensée |
| 25. Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre à ta coupe encore pleine (1862) |
| 26. À mademoiselle J. |
| 27. La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste (c. 1861–62) |
| 28. Au bord de la mer |
| 29. Puisque nos heures sont remplies |
| 30. Espoir en Dieu |
| 31. Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame (c. 1862–64) |
| 32. À Louis B. |
| 33. Dans l’église de *** |
| 34. Écrit sur la première page d’un Pétrarque |
| 35. Les autres en tous sens laissent aller leur vie |
| 36.
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