Читать книгу The Faure Song Cycles - Stephen Rumph - Страница 12

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:

Livre salutaire	Salutary book
Où le cœur s’emplit!	Where the heart is replenished!
Où tout sage austère	Where every austere sage
Travaille et pâlit!	Labors and grows pale!
Dont le sens rebelle	Whose recalcitrant meaning
Parfois se révèle!	Sometimes reveals itself!
Pythagore épèle	Pythagoras deciphers
Et Moïse lit!	And Moses reads!

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:

Contents of Victor Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule (1835), with dates of Fauré’s settings

Préface

Prélude

1. Dicté après juillet 1830

2. À la colonne

3. Hymne

4. Noces et festins

5. Napoléon II

6. Sur le bal de l’Hotel-de-Ville

7. O Dieu! Si vous avez la France sous vos ailes

8. À Canaris

9. Seule au pied de la tour d’où sort la voix du maître

10. À l’homme qui a livré une femme

11. A M. le D. d’O.

12. À Canaris

13. Il n’avait pas vingt ans. Il avait abusé

14. Oh! N’insultez jamais une femme qui tombe!

15. Conseil

16. Le grand homme vaincu peut perdre en un instant

17. À Alphonse Rabbe

18. Envoi des Feuilles d’automne à Madame ***

19. Anacréon, poète aux ondes érotiques

20. L’aurore s’allume (c. 1868–70)

21. Hier, la nuit d’été, qui nous prêtait ses voiles

22. Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air (1864)

23. Autre chanson (c. 1862–64)

24. Oh! pour remplir de moi ta rêveuse pensée

25. Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre à ta coupe encore pleine (1862)

26. À mademoiselle J.

27. La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste (c. 1861–62)

28. Au bord de la mer

29. Puisque nos heures sont remplies

30. Espoir en Dieu

31. Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame (c. 1862–64)

32. À Louis B.

33. Dans l’église de ***

34. Écrit sur la première page d’un Pétrarque

35. Les autres en tous sens laissent aller leur vie

36. Toi! sois bénie à jamais!

37. À mademoiselle Louise B.

38. Que nous avons le doute en nous

39. Date lilia

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 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.”