j’ai des mètres chers à la Muse natale:
La lyre en assouplit la cadence inégale.
Je te les donne, ami! C’est mon unique bien.
I have neither Grecian tripods nor Sicilian goblets,
Nor elegantly contoured Etruscan bronzes . . .
Of such treasures, Gallus, I can offer nothing;
But I have meters dear to my native Muse:
The lyre softens their uneven rhythm.
I give them to you, friend! They are my sole possession.
The dedication to the elegist Cornelius Gallus puns on gallus, or inhabitant of Gaul. The French poet thus appropriates Latin antiquity to his native tradition and passes the torch to his modern reader. In the “Études latines,” as Eduard Pich explained, the modern poet draws Horace into a living tradition: “These works nourish his genius and lead him to produce, in turn, works that death threatens to swallow up, but which the dying poet bequeaths to Gallus, his friend, his brother, his reader, who in turn will give new life to the ancient inspiration.”21
“Lydia,” the final étude, spins a delicate web of antitheses around the ancient carpe diem topos. The ode emphasizes the tension between permanence and flux, immortality and decay, timeless antiquity and modern art:
Lydia, sur tes roses joues,
Et sur ton col frais, et plus blanc
Que le lait, coule étincelant
L’or fluide que tu dénoues.
Le jour qui luit est le meilleur;
Oublions l’éternelle tombe;
Laisse tes baisers de colombe
Chanter sur tes lèvres en fleur.
Un lys caché répand sans cesse
Une odeur divine en ton sein;
Les délices, comme un essaim,
Sortent de toi, jeune Déesse!
Je t’aime et meurs, ô mes amours!
Mon âme en baisers m’est ravie.
O Lydia, rends-moi la vie,
Que je puisse mourir toujours!
Lydia, over your rosy cheeks
And your fresh neck, more white
Than milk, pours radiantly
The liquid gold that you loosen.
The shining day is best;
Let us forget the eternal tomb;
Let your dovelike kisses
Sing upon your flowering lips.
A hidden lily spreads unceasingly
A divine odor in your breast;
Delights, like a swarm,
Issue from you, young goddess!
I love you and die, oh my love.
My soul is ravished by kisses!
O Lydia, give me back my life
That I may die forever.
Lydia’s loosened hair suggests erotic abandon but also hints at the ultimate dénouement, death. The second stanza transforms her golden tresses into the shining sun, poised against the inexorable tomb, an opposition that also informs the paradoxical images of “liquid gold” (line 4) and “young goddess” (line 12). Likewise, the “divine odor” emanating from Lydia’s bosom in the third stanza evokes contradictory meanings, suggesting both youthful allure and embalming spices.22 Half woman, half goddess, Lydia unites sensuality and spirit, warm humanity and cool statuary.
The fourth stanza epitomizes Leconte de Lisle’s exquisite craftsmanship. A caesura divides the first line symmetrically, enhancing the resonance between “amours” and “meurt,” love and death (understood as la petite mort, in the best Renaissance tradition). The outer lines of the rimes embrassées, concerning the poet’s death, end with -ou, the darkest of vowel sounds; the inner lines, celebrating his rebirth, with -i, the brightest sound. The repeated m sounds of “t’aime,” “meurt,” “mes amours,” and “mon âme” draw the reader’s lips into a kiss, the central image of the stanza. Indeed, Lydia’s singing, dovelike lips resolve the antitheses developed across the entire poem: as the modern poet unites his mouth to timeless beauty, a new art takes flight. Such is the discipline of the Parnassian artist, who must continually die to self and rise transfigured within objective form. With its balance of passion and control, “Lydia” both practices and preaches Leconte de Lisle’s poetic creed.
Fauré’s setting achieves the same balance between spontaneity and discipline. He adhered to the conservative form of the salon romance, dividing Leconte de Lisle’s ode into two identical strophes (see example 2.1). Yet the composer abandoned his usual period or sentence structure and wrote an entirely through-composed melody, four unique phrases that unfold in a series of widening undulations. The first phrase surges passionately, while the second cascades back down like Lydia’s loosened tresses. The third phrase rises to high F for the image of the shining sun, but again falls earthward at the thought of “l’éternelle tombe.” Yet the rhapsodic melody conceals finely crafted motivic connections. The singer’s rising scale from m. 5 returns in the piano in mm. 17–18, while the rising sequence of interlocking thirds in mm. 3–4 is inverted in mm. 7–9. More subtly still, the voice exchanges between the tenor voice and melody in mm. 7–8 combine ascending and descending thirds in contrary motion. The fourth phrase nicely captures Leconte de Lisle’s chiaroscuro of beauty and death: a discreet touch of Italianate cantilena evokes the singing doves, while the flattened sixth and seventh degrees cast a shadow over Lydia’s flowering lips.
EXAMPLE 2.1. Fauré, “Lydia,” mm. 1–19.
EXAMPLE 2.1. (continued)
Leconte de Lisle’s fusion of ancient and modern art awoke a rich echo in Fauré, a graduate of the École Niedermeyer who had studied plainchant accompaniment, Renaissance polyphony, and Bach’s organ works.23 The strict four-part texture in “Lydia” creates a sense of historical distance, as does the hint of fauxbourdon in m. 11 and, of course, Fauré’s witty use of the Lydian mode in its proper key of F major. Fauré’s treatment of modality, however, reveals the same free appropriation of the past as Leconte de Lisle’s Horatian études. For those unfamiliar with the medieval modes, a brief explanation will help. Each of the modes has an authentic and a plagal version—for example, Dorian and Hypodorian—depending on the ambitus of the melody. In the authentic mode, the melody lies above the final, or concluding
