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Fauré had a striking predilection for such heterometric stanzas in his early songs, including “L’aube naît” (8 + 4 syllables), “S’il est un charmant gazon” (7 + 5), “Tristesse d’Olympio” (12 + 6), “Dans les ruines d’une abbaye” (7 + 3), and “Seule!” (8 + 4).17 In practice, these early heterometric settings fall rather flat. Fauré struggled with the short lines, which tend to sound padded and inert. Not until “Au bord de l’eau” (1875) and “Nell” (1878) are the uneven lines convincingly integrated within the phrase structure. Nevertheless, Fauré made an imaginative stab at the problem in “Le papillon et la fleur.”
The waltz topic helped Fauré negotiate this prosodic challenge. The song imitates not only the typical accompaniment of the waltz but also one of its most distinctive melodic features, an offbeat dotted rhythm introduced in m. 11 that permeates the vocal line (see example 1.2). The lilting figure pervades nineteenth-century waltzes and provided the signature rhythm for Ravel’s La valse. Waltzes evoke glittering entertainment, carefree pleasure, Second Empire frivolity—connotations that suit the flighty butterfly. Yet the waltz topic also helped Fauré to integrate the twelve- and three-syllable lines. Fauré fit each pair of unequal lines into a four-bar musical phrase but subdivided the phrases asymmetrically (2½ + 1½ bars), thereby reducing the need to pad the short lines. The waltz topic, with its lilting rhythm, provides the glue to connect the unequal lines: in each strophe, the long lines end with the offbeat rhythm, which the short lines immediately echo (see mm. 12–14 or 20–21). The syncopated figure thus unites Hugo’s unequal lines in the infectious, gyrating rhythm of the waltz.
EXAMPLE 1.2. Fauré, “Le papillon et la fleur,” mm. 1–25.
EXAMPLE 1.2. (continued)
Fauré has suffered much criticism for his apparent mangling of word accent in the early songs.18 In “Le papillon et la fleur,” for example, the first phrase places the weak second syllables of “pauvre” and “papillon” on strong beats, resulting in “pau-vre” and “pa-pi-llon.” Such critiques, however, assume an equivalence of musical and poetic meter that is antithetical to French prosody. In fact, Fauré seems deliberately to have separated musical and poetic accent in “Le papillon et la fleur.” Each phrase starts on the second eighth note of the bar, ensuring that the first syllable is not stressed. The first two phrases begin with an almost chant-like intonation, and aside from the dotted waltz rhythm, the entire vocal melody consists of a stream of equal eighth notes. Each phrase of “Le papillon et la fleur” begins in medias res and flows smoothly toward the final accented syllable. Fauré’s first crack at French prosody shows an almost exaggerated concern for its distinctively syllabic, nonaccentual structure.
Indeed, musical and poetic accents line up only twice in Hugo’s verses, at the end of each line and at the caesura of each twelve-syllable alexandrine. In the first two phrases of each strophe, Fauré marked the caesura with an upward leap on the sixth syllable, while in the third and fourth phrases he subdivided the line with a descending sequence. His opening phrase is perfectly tailored to Hugo’s prosody: the monotone melody leaps a minor third on the sixth syllable, “di-sait,” then descends to linger over an accented passing tone on the twelfth syllable, “cé-leste.” The musical phrase hugs the arching contour of Hugo’s alexandrine as it rises to the caesura and falls to the final syllable.19
Moreover, Fauré respected the subdivisions within each hemistich. The alexandrine offers a rich variety of internal divisions.20 In Hugo’s first line, for example, both hemistichs subdivide into 4 + 2 syllables:
Fauré’s melody fastidiously marks these subdivisions by dipping a half step on “fleur” and elongating the third syllable of “pap-i-llon.” If we disregard the metrical accents and attend only to the rhythm and contour of Fauré’s melody, we find that he has indeed set the word “papillon” in perfect accordance with the prosody. Howat and Kilpatrick have noted that the vocal line of “Le papillon et la fleur” falls into an implicit 3/4 meter (on the alexandrines), and the reason for the hemiola lies in Hugo’s first line.21 Unfortunately, the shortcomings of Fauré text-setting emerge during the succeeding strophes where he automatically repeated the rhythm of the first line even where it conflicts with the prosody. (Following the conventions of the romance, Fauré’s autograph provides only the vocal line of the second and third stanzas, duplicating the rhythm of the first stanza.) The second strophe, for example, begins with a 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 line better suited to 6/8 meter:
The third strophe, on the other hand, scans as 2 + 4 + 4 + 2:
In his early songs, alas, Fauré’s attention to prosody often ends with the first line.22
Did Fauré really attend so closely to Hugo’s verse structure? Are we perhaps imputing too much to the adolescent composer? The piano ritornello provides the answer. The first four bars consist of a little dialogue in the right hand, with soaring scales for the flighty butterfly and short chromatic responses for the dejected flower. The sequential melody that follows in mm. 5–8 is an ornamented version of the singer’s third phrase; given the primacy of the vocal line in the romance, we may assume that Fauré composed the strophes first and then derived the ritornello from the third phrase. The “butterfly” scales in mm. 1–4 derive in turn from the sequence in mm. 5–8, beginning on the second beat and inverting exactly the first four notes of the descending scale. We may conclude, then, that Fauré composed the opening dialogue last of all, as an afterthought. Now there are twelve notes in the “butterfly” scale and three notes in the chromatic “flower” response in mm. 1–2. The same pair of twelve- and three-note motives repeats up an octave in mm. 3–4. Taken together, the note count of the piano melody in mm. 1–4 comes to 12 + 3 + 12 + 3—the precise syllable count of Hugo’s stanzas! With this erudite wink, the novice composer reveals that he is already an astute reader of French prosody.
SYNTAX AND HARMONY
Fauré confronted a different poetic technique in “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre.” The most noticeable feature of Hugo’s poem is the insistent repetition of “puisque” (since) in the first twelve lines. This litany results in a striking instance of hypotaxis, or nesting of subordinate clauses within a sentence. In parataxis, the opposite syntactic principle, clauses are strung together additively as in “I came, I saw, I conquered.” A hypotactic version of Caesar’s sentence might read, “After I came, because I saw, I conquered.” The first two clauses no longer stand alone but must await completion by the main clause. Hugo exploited hypotaxis artfully in “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” to project the poem’s meaning. While Fauré’s setting does not fully align with Hugo’s rhetorical design, it shows a keen awareness of his syntactic structure.
The five stanzas of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” divide into two groups based on syntax. The first three stanzas belong to a single complex sentence and consist of nine subordinate clauses:
Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre à ta coupe encor pleine;
Puisque j’ai dans tes mains posé mon front pâli;
Puisque
