gaze effortlessly embraces a bounded field that displays familiar and alluring objects; the hyacinth blooms there; the rose spreads its purple robe beside the green ivy; the swallow babbles from break of dawn; the dew-drunk cicada sings on the high branches; reclining on the fresh myrtle and green lotus, an old man with white temples but a youthful heart drains his cup and watches the young girls dance to the sound of the zither. This little landscape, invented for the express pleasure of the eyes, is so lively, so brilliant, that we never think to count the artificial flowers in the decorative garlands; the little scenes of this mascarade galante succeed one another too quickly to weary us.11
Joubert’s vignette summons all the Anacreontic commonplaces—idyllic nature, wine, revelry, erotic desire, old age. Yet it also evokes the pleasure parks of the fêtes galantes, the fantastic eighteenth-century landscapes of Antoine Watteau that were enjoying a vogue in French poetry.12 Joubert fashioned his Arcadia as a theater, adorned with silk roses, where maskers play their stock roles. His essay celebrates the deliberate artifice of the Anacreontic genre, its play between surface convention and lyric depth.13
No poem in Les chants du crépuscule better demonstrates this equivocation than the lyric subtitled “S’il est un charmant gazon.” The poem bears the title “Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air”—roughly, new words to an old tune. Hugo wove pastoral imagery into an intimate romantic confession, using a complex rhyme scheme and tortuous syntax. Yet his artful poem is haunted by the specter of the lost air. The anonymous folk relic hides beneath the modern poet’s verses, mutely reminding us that Hugo’s jasmine, lily, and honeysuckle are but painted copies of nature. Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Franck, and many other composers set “S’il est un charmant gazon,” but as we shall see, only Fauré found the irony in Hugo’s title.
The poems that Fauré chose from Les chants du crépuscule exemplify both the erotic tone of the Anacreontic genre and its delicate artifice. “La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste,” in which a flower chides her unfaithful butterfly, is a sly allegory by the priapic Hugo with an envoi dedicated to his mistress Juliette Drouet. Notably, Fauré chose the only two chansons in Hugo’s collection, songs in which lyric expression is distanced as performance. “Autre chanson” (subtitled “L’aube naît”) even originated as a stage song in Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue. While we can only guess at Fauré’s treatment of “L’aube naît,” the autograph score of “S’il est un charmant gazon” imitates a serenader’s mandolin with an accompaniment in broken staccato chords. Fauré used a similar piano figuration in “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” despite the poem’s more elevated register (he was perhaps tempted by Hugo’s racy opening line, “Since I placed my lips to your still brimming cup”). Fauré left a motivic signature on these chanson accompaniments: the piano ritornellos of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” and “S’il est un charmant gazon” trail off with the same descending pentatonic figure, as does the ritornello in the autograph of “Mai” (see example 1.1). This naïve coda, which follows passages of real harmonic complexity, sets an appropriately arch tone for poems presided over by the spirit of Anacreon.
EXAMPLE 1.1. Common pentatonic motive in Fauré’s settings from Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule. Based on Fauré, Complete Songs, vol. 1: 1861–1882, ed. Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick (London: Peters Edition, 2015).
a. “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” m. 8.
b. “Mai,” m. 34.
c. “S’il est un charmant gazon,” m. 8.
“Anacréon aux ondes érotiques” advertises the titillating nature of the genre, but it offered Fauré another clue as well. The protagonist finds the refreshing waters “mi-côte,” midway up the mountain. Similarly, Hugo’s ode arrives midway through Les chants du crépuscule as a respite from his odes to the Greek patriot Canaris or his diatribe against the Chambre des députés. The Anacreontic ode, or odelette as poets from Ronsard to Gautier called it, occupies a middle register between the sublime ode and the lower forms of satire and comedy. In short, an educated reader would not have mistaken the turn to pastoral love poetry in the second half of Les chants du crépuscule as a stylistic regression but would have understood it as a self-conscious modulation between genres.
Neither should the simplicity of Fauré’s adolescent songs imply a lack of maturity, technique, or ambition. Read within the context of Hugo’s collection, their unpretentious charm suggests a deliberate artistic choice. Fauré’s student songs do not lack in sophistication, but they mask it behind a faux-naïf manner that matches Hugo’s artful simplicity. What distinguishes these songs from truly naïve romances is the keen awareness of Hugo’s poetic craft: in apparently systematic fashion, Fauré concentrated on a different aspect of the poet’s art in each song, whether prosody, syntax, rhetoric, or genre. This astute reading should come as no surprise in a pupil of Niedermeyer’s school who studied literature as part of the curriculum and won prizes in 1858 and 1862.14 The following discussion, based on the autograph scores, looks closely at Fauré’s craftsmanship in his student songs, and readers should prepare for some detailed technical analysis. It will be time and effort well spent. The analyses of the Hugo settings lay the foundations for the rest of the book in two ways. First, they establish Fauré’s bona fides as a reader, showing the urbane grasp of poetic art in his earliest settings. Second, they show how instead of merely tossing off individual songs, the young composer was already exploring a single idea from different angles, generating a set of songs unified neither by musical features nor by a story line, but by a common poetic ideal.
But do Fauré’s settings from Les chants du crepuscule in fact constitute a hidden cycle? To answer this question, we must recapture the horizon against which he was writing in the early 1860s. French composers had as yet no native models equivalent to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, or Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. Not until 1866 did Jules Massenet compose Poème d’avril, the first French song cycle with a unified narrative and thematic recollections. Fauré could only look back to Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’éte (1841) and Félicien David’s Les perles d’Orient (1846).15 Apart from its evocative title, Berlioz’s work coheres solely through its poetic source, Gautier’s La Comédie de la mort, while David’s songs have four different poets and share only an exotic theme. By these standards, Fauré’s five songs would indeed qualify as a cycle had he published them together. The common piano motive certainly argues for a unified conception. The autograph of “Mai” provides another possible clue: Fauré entitled the folio “No. 4/Mai!/à Madame H. Garnier,” suggesting that he originally ordered the five songs from Les chants du crépuscule as a set (“Mai” was indeed the fourth song composed). Unfortunately, the composer’s intentions must remain uncertain, especially without the autograph of “L’aube naît.”
PROSODY AND RHYTHM
Fauré’s first song, “Le papillon et la fleur,” does not at first appear to reach very high. The breezy tone, unremarkable harmonies, and waltz accompaniment might tempt us to dismiss the song as a Second Empire bonbon. Yet a closer look reveals a surprising level of craftsmanship. Fauré paid special attention to Hugo’s prosody as he addressed the knotty relationship between French verse and musical meter. Unlike musical meter, French prosody is governed not by accentual pattern but solely by syllable count. The second page of Louis Quicherat’s popular Petit traité de versification française (1850) instructs the student that “since French poetic lines have a fixed number of syllables, one must learn, above all, to count the syllables of the constituent words, or of those that
