2 Songs

There are just two songs in Fauré’s Op. 46 set (1887), by different poets. “Les Présents” (“The Gifts”) is the work of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; “Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”) is the composer’s first setting of Paul Verlaine. Both these choices on Fauré’s part represent an interest in modern developments in poetry—those of Symbolism and the Decadent movement. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was a disciple of Baudelaire and a keen Wagnerite: his text speaks of a sickness of the heart, of torments, shattered hopes and remorse. The lethargic motion of Fauré’s setting includes a number of carefully planned harmonic surprises placed on significant words. Verlaine’s “Clair de lune”—the first poem in his volume Fêtes galantes (1869)—is part of the writer’s frequent evocation of the 18th-century world of masks and bergamasques. Here it inspires the most entrancing setting, especially in the composer’s accompaniment, which imitates a lute as part of a depiction of a melancholy, moonlit, artificial world of dancers, singers and disguises. Through his extraordinary harmonic skill, there is a definite and characteristic ambiguity to Fauré’s writing that manages to suggest simultaneously something light, graceful and merry together with something tinged with sadness.