dissonant in the diatonic collection. Until the final cadence, moreover, the prelude consists entirely of seventh chords that heighten the harmonic instability. The tonality itself remains in doubt through the first four bars, whose oscillation between bø7 and E7 implies a resolution to A minor. Clarity emerges gradually in mm. 5–8, which complete the descent through the fifth cycle (a7-d7-G7-C). Fauré’s prelude thus creates a neat harmonic analogue to Hugo’s hypotactic design. Like the poem, it begins from a point of instability and uncertainty, with the harmonic equivalent of subordinate clauses, and generates maximal tension before resolving. Once again, we perceive an urbane grasp of Hugo’s art beneath the naïve veneer of the romance.
EXAMPLE 1.3. Fauré, “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” mm. 1–40.
EXAMPLE 1.3. (continued)
EXAMPLE 1.3. (continued)
RHETORIC AND MOTIVE
Fauré responded alertly to another facet of Hugo’s craft in his setting of “Puisque mai tout en fleur”: rhetorical expression. Of his five early songs from Les chants du crépuscule, only “Mai” employs direct lyric address. “Le papillon et la fleur” is a monologue quoted by a narrator; “L’aube naît” and “S’il est un gazon charmant” are chansons; and the mandolin accompaniment also seems to frame “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” as a performed song. “Mai” bears no trace of the chanson genre nor is it even prefaced by a piano ritornello. In Hugo’s poem, Fauré found a paragon of lyric expression, a direct and exuberant invitation to the beloved. Indeed, the composer faced the challenge of containing Hugo’s vigorous rhetoric within the genteel confines of the strophic romance.
The poem achieves its headlong effect through the rhetorical figure of enumeratio, piling noun upon noun, phrase upon phrase:
Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame,
Viens! ne te lasse pas de mêler à ton âme
La campagne, les bois, les ombrages charmants,
Les larges clairs de lune au bord des flots dormants,
Le sentier qui finit où le chemin commence,
Et l’air et le printemps et l’horizon immense,
L’horizon que ce monde attache humble et joyeux
Comme une lèvre au bas de la robe des cieux.
Viens! et que le regard des pudiques étoiles
Qui tombe sur la terre à travers tant de voiles,
Que l’arbre pénétré de parfum et de chants,
Que le souffle embrasé de midi dans les champs,
Et l’ombre et le soleil et l’onde et la verdure,
Et le rayonnement de toute la nature,
Fassent épanouir, comme une double fleur,
La beauté sur ton front et l’amour dans ton cœur!
Since May, full of flowers, calls us to the meadows,
Come! do not weary of mingling your soul
With the countryside, the woods, the pleasant shade,
The wide moonlight on the banks of the sleeping waters,
The path that ends where the road begins,
And the air, and the springtime, and the vast horizon,
The horizon that the world attaches, humbly and joyfully,
Like a lip at the hem of heaven’s robe.
Come! And may the gaze of the chaste stars,
Which fall to earth through so many veils,
May the tree infused with perfume and songs,
May the breeze inflamed with noontime in the fields,
And the shade and the sun and the wave and the greenery,
And the resplendence of all nature
Cause to blossom, like a double flower,
Beauty on your brow and love in your heart!
The poem unspools in two long sentences into which Hugo crowded a jumble of nature imagery. The phrases tumble out breathlessly, overwhelming the syntax as if straining toward a mystical union with the cosmos. The landscape is imbued with religious meaning—chaste stars gaze down through their veils; the earth kisses the edge of heaven’s robe like the hem of Christ’s garment. The poem plunges into an animistic nature and ends with a triumphant fusion of body and soul, outward beauty and inward love.
The form of Hugo’s poem produces the same cumulative effect. It does not divide into stanzas but consists of an unbroken stream of rhyming couplets. This stichic form is typically found in epics and discursive poems where the poet sacrifices concentration of thought to flexibility. In this case, the continuous form heightens the sense of impetuosity as if the deluge of emotion had burst the banks of the stanza. The absence of interlocking rhymes drives the poem onward from one couplet to the next.
Comparing Hugo’s poem with Fauré’s setting can easily lead to disappointment. As Graham Johnson remarked, “The problem faced by the interpreter of this song is that Hugo’s over-the-top romantic enthusiasm (whereby he seems to embrace the whole of nature) is ill-suited to Fauré’s less extrovert temperament.”24 Yet Fauré found his own quiet answer to Hugo’s virile rhetoric. “Mai” wastes no time on a piano prelude but launches the singer after two bars of arpeggios. Fauré filled out Hugo’s rolling alexandrines with another broad melody without rests, but the form is even more spacious than that of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre.” The two strophes begin with a sixteen-bar period, but the consequent closes on a half cadence, extending the period into a thirty-two-bar lyric form (A1A2BA3) that does not reach tonic closure until the end of the strophe. The B section wanders far afield, modulating to C♭ major (♭III) before reaching an apparent cadence on G♭ major. The augmented triad in m. 24 frustrates the cadence, however, and pivots back to V7 for the final A phrase. Even then, a deceptive cadence undercuts the reprise, deferring tonic closure until the final bar. With its breathless urgency, formal breadth, and harmonic twists, Fauré’s setting responds ably to Hugo’s rhapsodic poem. The composer also nodded to the poet’s religious imagery with the modal cadence of the first phrase (m. 10) and the fauxbourdon 6/3 chords leading into the reprise (m. 25).
Fauré found an even more direct analogue to Hugo’s accumulative rhetoric. As Frits Noske pointed out, the four phrases of “Mai” spin out different versions of the opening two-bar motive (see example 1.4).25 This ebullient melodic idea bounds up a fifth,
