The Faure Song Cycles: Poetry and Music, 1861–1921

By Stephen Rumph

Gabriel Fauré’s mélodies offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long career, Fauré composed all but a handful of his songs within six carefully integrated cycles. Fauré moved systematically through his poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the most important cultural issues of the period, Fauré reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The Fauré Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination and insight of Fauré’s musical readings. This book offers not only close readings of Fauré’s musical works but an interdisciplinary study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic currents of French poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520969902

Stephen Rumph

Stephen Rumph is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works and Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics. He is also the coeditor of Fauré Studies, part of the Cambridge Composer Series.

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The Fauré Song Cycles

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music, established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti and Michael P. Roth.

Also, support for this publication was generously provided by the Publications Endowment of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Fauré Song Cycles

Poetry and Music, 1861–1921

Stephen Rumph

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by Stephen Rumph

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rumph, Stephen C., author.

Title: The Fauré song cycles : poetry and music, 1861–1921 / Stephen Rumph.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004308 (print) | LCCN 2020004309 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520297623 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520969902 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Fauré, Gabriel, 1845–1924. Songs. | Song cycles—19th century—History and criticism. | Song cycles—20th century—History and criticism. | Songs—19th century—Analysis, appreciation. | Songs—20th century—Analysis, appreciation. | Music and literature—France—History—19th century. | Music and literature—France—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML410.F27 R86 2020 (print) | LCC ML410.F27 (ebook) | DDC 782.4/7092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004308

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004309

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10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Joseph Kerman, in memoriam

CONTENTS

List of Music Examples

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Romancing the mélodie

A Hugo Cycle?

2. Ascending Parnassus

Poème d’un jour, op. 21

3. The Discovery of Music

Cinq mélodies de Venise, op. 58

4. Wagnerian correspondances

La bonne chanson, op. 61

5. Theatrical Song

La chanson d’Ève, op. 95

6. Writing in the Sand

Le jardin clos, op. 106

7. Neoclassical Voyages

Mirages, op. 113 and L’horizon chimérique, op. 118

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MUSIC EXAMPLES

Example 1.1. Common pentatonic motive in Fauré’s settings from Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule.

Example 1.2. Fauré, Le papillon et la fleur, mm. 1–25.

Example 1.3. Fauré, Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre, mm. 1–40.

Example 1.4. Fauré, variation of a head motive across the first strophe of Mai.

Example 1.5. Fauré, S’il est un charmant gazon, mm. 1–24.

Example 1.6. Fauré, S’il est un charmant gazon, mm. 57–68.

Example 2.1. Fauré, Lydia, mm. 1–19.

Example 2.2. Tonal ambivalence in Fauré, Rencontre, Poème d’un jour, op. 21, mm. 1–21.

Example 2.3. Modulation by Weitzmann regions in Fauré, Toujours, mm. 11–25.

Example 2.4. Weitzmann region in Fauré, Introït, Requiem, op. 48, mm. 50–61. Derived from Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 55.

Example 2.5. Fauré, Adieu, Poème d’un jour, mm. 1–12.

Example 2.6. Hypothetical half cadence in Fauré, Adieu, Poème d’un jour , m. 8.

Example 2.7. Fauré, Adieu, Poème d’un jour , mm. 28–34.

Example 3.1. Minuet modules in Fauré, Clair de lune.

Example 3.2. Transformation of a prosodic rhythm in Fauré, Mandoline, Cinq mélodies "de Venise, " op. 58.

Example 3.3. Fauré’s Venice motive in the Cinq mélodies de Venise.

Example 3.4. Fauré, En sourdine, Cinq mélodies de Venise, mm. 1–16.

Example 3.5. Fauré, À Clymène, Cinq mélodies de Venise, mm. 1–13.

Example 3.6. Fauré, À Clymène, Cinq mélodies "de Venise," mm. 48–57.

Example 3.7. Intertextuality in Fauré, Cinq mélodies de Venise.

Example 4.1. Leitmotives in Fauré, La bonne chanson, op. 61.

Example 4.2. Octave family of leitmotives in Fauré, La bonne chanson.

Example 4.3. Appoggiatura family of leitmotives in Fauré, La bonne chanson.

Example 4.4. Lydia family of leitmotives in Fauré, La bonne chanson.

Example 4.5. Fauré, Une Sainte en son auréole, La bonne chanson , mm. 22–27.

Example 4.6. Pentatonic leitmotives in Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Example 4.7. Fauré, N’est-ce pas? La bonne chanson , mm. 1–12.

Example 4.8. Fauré, N’est-ce pas? La bonne chanson , mm. 61–69.

Example 4.9. Transformation of Avowal motive in Fauré, La bonne chanson.

Example 5.1. Leitmotives of Fauré, La chanson d’Ève, op. 95.

Example 5.2. Transformation of diegetic music in Fauré, Pénélope , act 2, scenes 1–2.

Example 5.3. Fauré, The King’s Three Blind Daughters, incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande, op. 80, mm. 1–8.

Example 5.4. Fauré, Paradis, La chanson d’Ève, mm. 1–23.

Example 5.5. Octatonic rotation of motive B in Fauré, Comme Dieu rayonne, La chanson d’Ève, mm. 15–20.

Example 5.6. Rotation of Voice of God motive through three octatonic collections in Fauré, Paradis, La chanson d’Ève, mm. 76–85.

Example 5.7. Symmetrical rotations of motive B in Fauré, Dans un parfum de roses blanches, La chanson d’Ève, mm. 1–18.

Example 5.8. Complete rotation through the octatonic scale in Fauré, O Mort, poussière d’étoiles, La chanson d’Ève, mm. 18–21.

Example 6.1. Transformations of a refrain in Fauré, Je me poserai sur ton cœur, Le jardin clos, op. 106.

Example 6.2. Fauré, Exaucement, Le jardin clos, mm. 1–9.

Example 6.3. Fauré, Exaucement, Le jardin clos, mm. 16–21.

Example 6.4. Fauré, Inscription sur le sable, Le jardin clos, mm. 1–5.

Example 6.5. Fauré, Dans la nymphée, Le jardin clos, mm. 1–5.

Example 6.6. Fauré, La messagère, Le jardin clos, mm. 1–9.

Example 6.7. Transformations of the Prinner schema in Fauré, Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux, Le jardin clos .

Example 7.1. Octatonic rotations in Fauré, Cygne sur l’eau, Mirages, op. 113, mm. 25–29.

Example 7.2. Wagnerian influence in Fauré, Reflets dans l’eau, Mirages .

Example 7.3. Fauré, Danseuse, Mirages , mm. 1–6.

Example 7.4. Fauré, La mer est infinie, L’horizon chimérique, op. 118, mm. 1–11.

Example 7.5. Fauré, Je me suis embarqué, L’horizon chimérique, mm. 40–46.

Example 7.6. Fauré, Diane, Séléné, L’horizon chimérique , mm. 16–20.

Example 7.7. Fauré, augmented triads in Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimés, L’horizon chimérique .

PREFACE

Gabriel Fauré cultivated no genre so richly across his long career as the mélodie. His hundred-odd songs offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression, and with good reason since they span so formidable a period of musical change. He wrote his first song in 1861, two years after the premiere of Gounod’s Faust, and his last in 1921, the year of Arnold Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone work. Fauré’s songwriting career divides strikingly in half: until 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed all but a handful within six carefully integrated cycles. (The lone outlier is Poème d’un jour, a short triptych from 1878.) The song cycle was not just another genre for Fauré. It represents a major vector in his creative life, a fundamental rethinking of song composition that left its mark on almost half of his mélodies.

Fauré’s turn to cyclic composition comes as little surprise as he had always tended to concentrate on individual poets. He confined himself to Victor Hugo in his early years, drawing his first five songs from a single collection, then moved systematically through Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier before immersing himself in the poets of the Parnassian school. In rapid succession, he would set ten poems by Armand Silvestre (1878–84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887–94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906–14). Fauré reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, Fauré conceived his song cycles as integrated works rather than mere sets. He reordered poems creatively and used thematic recollections, key schemes, and even leitmotives to unify the songs. The following chapters probe the expressive design of his seven song cycles, seeking the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of poetry and music.

Previous studies of Fauré’s songs have focused on individual poets and texts but have paid little attention to the broader schools, movements, and aesthetic currents of French poetry. This book widens the lens on this context, approaching each of Fauré’s song cycles as the expression of a particular moment in French poetic and musical history. Chapter 1 unearths traces of a hidden cycle in Fauré’s earliest songs, showing how Victor Hugo’s play between genres allowed the young composer to navigate issues of national identity in French song. Chapter 2 interprets Poème d’un jour as a programmatic expression of Parnassian ideals. Chapters 3 and 4 read Fauré’s Verlaine cycles, the Cinq mélodies de Venise and La bonne chanson, within the entwined discourses of Symbolism and French Wagnerism. Chapters 5 and 6 relate the Van Lerberghe cycles, La chanson d’Ève and Le jardin clos, to the different concerns of Symbolist theater and Bergsonian philosophy. Finally, chapter 7 interprets the last two cycles, Mirages and L’horizon chimérique, as Fauré’s response to post–World War I neoclassicism. The portrait emerges of an astute reader and salon habitué who engaged keenly with the aesthetic issues of contemporary poetry.

Critics have rarely taken so generous a view of Fauré’s literary acumen. Within the Belle Époque triumvirate, Fauré has figured as the musical purist, indifferent to the literary and artistic happenings that beguiled Debussy and Ravel. As Vladimir Jankélévitch put it succinctly, he has no antennae.¹ Assessments of Fauré’s songs always acknowledge his sensitivity to word music, his talent for evoking a general mood, and his Gallic qualities of elegance and taste. Yet not even his fiercest advocates have suggested anything akin to David Code’s evaluation of Debussy: It was through his intensive readings of contemporary poets, from Théodore de Banville and Dante Gabriel Rossetti through Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, that he primarily refined the literary sensibility that was to render him one of the finest musical readers of poetic and dramatic language.² If any polemic fuels my study, it is the contention that Fauré belongs among the finest musical readers, and not sidelined as, in Debussy’s words, the Maître des Charmes.³

This book offers close readings of poetic and musical texts, following a strictly topical approach. It thus does not move systematically through every song, nor does it delve deeply into the biographical context. Readers can fill out the picture with Graham Johnson’s thickly documented compendium on Fauré’s songs and poets or Klaus Strobel’s analytical survey of the complete mélodies. The life-and-works studies of Jean-Michel Nectoux and Robert Orledge also contain a wealth of information, as do the critical editions from Edition Peters and Bärenreiter. In this book, I have stuck doggedly to the artistic matters at hand, which has meant sacrificing many a colorful biographical detail and musical observation. The reader will be amply repaid, I hope, with a new appreciation for Fauré’s creative imagination and for the depth and variety with which he synthesized poetry and music in these seven precious works.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks go to Carlo Caballero, the intellectual companion, collaborator, and friend from whom I have learned so much about Fauré. Roy Howat also lent generous encouragement and advice throughout the project. I am grateful to Emily Kilpatrick and David Code as well for their detailed and thoughtful comments on the book manuscript. Marshall Brown once again lent a watchful literary eye, while Jonathan Bernard and Robert O. Gjerdingen provided feedback on the musical analyses.

Thanks are due to my colleagues at the University of Washington School of Music, especially Richard Karpen, for their support of this project. The book received welcome funding from the UW Royalty Research Fund as well as a Kreielsheimer Grant for Research Excellence in the Arts.

Cambridge University Press kindly granted permission to reprint chapter 1, which originally appeared in Fauré Studies (2020). Chapter 2 and parts of chapter 5 appeared, respectively, in The Musical Quarterly and Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Raina Polivka has been a wonderfully supportive and helpful editor. I thank her, Madison Wetzell, Jeffrey Wyneken, Emilia Thiuri, and the rest of the staff at University of California Press for another effortless publication venture. I am grateful to Robert Geiger as well for the musical engraving.

My heartfelt thanks go out to all my friends and family, both living and departed. The love and wisdom you have shared with me means more than I can express.

I owe a special debt to Joseph Kerman, my Berkeley adviser whose magnum opus The Beethoven Quartets inspired my title. His deep, passionate, and humane engagement with musical art works remains an undimmed beacon, and I gratefully dedicate this book to his memory.

Finally, to the One who gives both life and meaning be all the praise. To quote Fauré’s magnum opus, Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion.

1

Romancing the mélodie

A Hugo Cycle?

Fauré’s first song cycle dates from 1878, but our story begins much earlier at the École Niedermeyer. Fauré’s student songs, written between 1861 and 1864, already give a taste of the cyclic impulse that would come to dominate his songwriting. This premonition does not appear in musical devices, whether key schemes, thematic recollections, or recurring motives; these features come and go across his seven song cycles. Nor can we locate it in a narrative, for three of those cycles lack any story line. The telltale element in Fauré’s adolescent songs is a common poetic vision, a reading that transcends the individual author and poems and engages deeper artistic concerns. As in his later song cycles, Fauré grasped poetry not merely as a source of evocative texts but as a nexus of technical and aesthetic issues bearing on his historical moment. And the issue that unites his earliest songs is genre.

Fauré’s student songs demonstrate his lifelong penchant for focusing on a single poet, indeed, a single collection. All six have texts by Victor Hugo and five come from Les chants du crépuscule (1835). Fauré mined Hugo’s volume for Le papillon et la fleur, Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre, Mai, L’aube naît, and S’il est un charmant gazon (published as Rêve d’amour). Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre remained unpublished and L’aube naît has vanished entirely, although it is mentioned alongside the other songs in a letter from 1864.¹ Fauré set yet another poem from Les chants du crépuscule, L’aurore s’allume, toward the end of the decade.

In studying Fauré’s adolescent songs, we immediately face the question of genre. No single category existed for French art song in the 1860s equivalent to the Austro-Germanic Lied. Since the late eighteenth century, the native romance had dominated song production in France. Elegant and unpretentious, the romance featured sentimental or characteristic texts set in strophic form with an unobtrusive piano accompaniment.² During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new genre emerged alongside the romance, the highbrow mélodie. Inspired by Schubert’s Lieder, composers of mélodies gave the piano a more independent role, experimented with nonstrophic forms, and enriched the expressive palette. Guided by Frits Noske’s classic study La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc (1954), histories of French song have tended to trace an evolutionary narrative in which the mélodie inevitably usurps the place of the romance and reigns supreme after 1870.³

Fauré himself seems to ratify this narrative in a letter from 1870. The composer agrees to send an old schoolmate "the little mélodie that you asked for (most likely Lydia) as well as a copy of my romance ‘S’il est un charmant gazon.’ "⁴ The letter appears to cordon off Fauré’s student songs from later and more ambitious compositions like Lydia or his three Baudelaire settings. And indeed, his adolescent Hugo songs are lightweight by comparison, with their pastoral texts, simple accompaniments, and strophic form. Fauré’s critics have found it easy to follow his lead and retrace the history of French song across his early career. Charles Kœchlin brushed past the Hugo settings, dismissing one as "slightly ‘romance,’ and rejoiced at Fauré’s emancipation from strophic form.⁵ Jean-Michel Nectoux entitled his fine chapter on the early songs From the romance to the mélodie, while Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick hailed Fauré’s transition from the romance to the mélodie" during the 1860s.⁶

Like all evolutionary narratives, however, this account of Fauré’s early songwriting downplays the role of the historical agent. It ignores the way in which the composer himself understood and navigated the genres available to him. The evolution of French song into the mélodie was by no means preordained in the early 1860s. Composers continued to label songs both romance and mélodie until the end of the decade, designations that reflected real differences in form and style.⁷ Nor did Fauré lack for Germanic models of song composition during his student years. His tutor Camille Saint-Saëns was a champion of Liszt, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, while his teacher and headmaster Louis Niedermeyer had virtually founded the mélodie genre with his 1820 song Le lac. Niedermeyer cast Alphonse de Lamartine’s elegiac poem in the form of an operatic scène in which three stanzas of obbligato recitative introduce the lyric set piece, three strophes entitled Romance. As Saint-Saëns attested, Niedermeyer "broke the mold of the tired old French romance and, inspired by the beautiful poems of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, created a new genre, a superior art analogous to the German Lied."⁸

Fauré’s setting of Hugo’s Tristesse d’Olympio (Les rayons et les ombres), written around 1865, demonstrates how easily he could adopt this elevated style. His song emulates Niedermeyer’s Le lac just as Hugo’s poem emulates Lamartine’s elegy. A recitative-like Grave built over an operatic lamento bass leads into two stormy strophes with a notably free phrase structure. This serious mélodie, written just a year or two after S’il est un charmant gazon, muddies the image of a linear evolution from romance to mélodie. Indeed, Fauré circled 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:

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:

The 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