Читать книгу The Faure Song Cycles - Stephen Rumph - Страница 15

Fauré responded alertly to another facet of Hugo’s craft in his setting of “Puisque mai tout en fleur”: rhetorical expression. Of his five early songs from Les chants du crépuscule, only “Mai” employs direct lyric address. “Le papillon et la fleur” is a monologue quoted by a narrator; “L’aube naît” and “S’il est un gazon charmant” are chansons; and the mandolin accompaniment also seems to frame “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” as a performed song. “Mai” bears no trace of the chanson genre nor is it even prefaced by a piano ritornello. In Hugo’s poem, Fauré found a paragon of lyric expression, a direct and exuberant invitation to the beloved. Indeed, the composer faced the challenge of containing Hugo’s vigorous rhetoric within the genteel confines of the strophic romance.

The poem achieves its headlong effect through the rhetorical figure of enumeratio, piling noun upon noun, phrase upon phrase:

Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame,

Viens! ne te lasse pas de mêler à ton âme

La campagne, les bois, les ombrages charmants,

Les larges clairs de lune au bord des flots dormants,

Le sentier qui finit où le chemin commence,

Et l’air et le printemps et l’horizon immense,

L’horizon que ce monde attache humble et joyeux

Comme une lèvre au bas de la robe des cieux.

Viens! et que le regard des pudiques étoiles

Qui tombe sur la terre à travers tant de voiles,

Que l’arbre pénétré de parfum et de chants,

Que le souffle embrasé de midi dans les champs,

Et l’ombre et le soleil et l’onde et la verdure,

Et le rayonnement de toute la nature,

Fassent épanouir, comme une double fleur,

La beauté sur ton front et l’amour dans ton cœur!

Since May, full of flowers, calls us to the meadows,

Come! do not weary of mingling your soul

With the countryside, the woods, the pleasant shade,

The wide moonlight on the banks of the sleeping waters,

The path that ends where the road begins,

And the air, and the springtime, and the vast horizon,

The horizon that the world attaches, humbly and joyfully,

Like a lip at the hem of heaven’s robe.

Come! And may the gaze of the chaste stars,

Which fall to earth through so many veils,

May the tree infused with perfume and songs,

May the breeze inflamed with noontime in the fields,

And the shade and the sun and the wave and the greenery,

And the resplendence of all nature

Cause to blossom, like a double flower,

Beauty on your brow and love in your heart!

The poem unspools in two long sentences into which Hugo crowded a jumble of nature imagery. The phrases tumble out breathlessly, overwhelming the syntax as if straining toward a mystical union with the cosmos. The landscape is imbued with religious meaning—chaste stars gaze down through their veils; the earth kisses the edge of heaven’s robe like the hem of Christ’s garment. The poem plunges into an animistic nature and ends with a triumphant fusion of body and soul, outward beauty and inward love.

The form of Hugo’s poem produces the same cumulative effect. It does not divide into stanzas but consists of an unbroken stream of rhyming couplets. This stichic form is typically found in epics and discursive poems where the poet sacrifices concentration of thought to flexibility. In this case, the continuous form heightens the sense of impetuosity as if the deluge of emotion had burst the banks of the stanza. The absence of interlocking rhymes drives the poem onward from one couplet to the next.

Comparing Hugo’s poem with Fauré’s setting can easily lead to disappointment. As Graham Johnson remarked, “The problem faced by the interpreter of this song is that Hugo’s over-the-top romantic enthusiasm (whereby he seems to embrace the whole of nature) is ill-suited to Fauré’s less extrovert temperament.”²⁴ Yet Fauré found his own quiet answer to Hugo’s virile rhetoric. “Mai” wastes no time on a piano prelude but launches the singer after two bars of arpeggios. Fauré filled out Hugo’s rolling alexandrines with another broad melody without rests, but the form is even more spacious than that of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre.” The two strophes begin with a sixteen-bar period, but the consequent closes on a half cadence, extending the period into a thirty-two-bar lyric form (A₁A₂BA₃) that does not reach tonic closure until the end of the strophe. The B section wanders far afield, modulating to C♭ major (♭III) before reaching an apparent cadence on G♭ major. The augmented triad in m. 24 frustrates the cadence, however, and pivots back to V⁷ for the final A phrase. Even then, a deceptive cadence undercuts the reprise, deferring tonic closure until the final bar. With its breathless urgency, formal breadth, and harmonic twists, Fauré’s setting responds ably to Hugo’s rhapsodic poem. The composer also nodded to the poet’s religious imagery with the modal cadence of the first phrase (m. 10) and the fauxbourdon 6/3 chords leading into the reprise (m. 25).

Fauré found an even more direct analogue to Hugo’s accumulative rhetoric. As Frits Noske pointed out, the four phrases of “Mai” spin out different versions of the opening two-bar motive (see example 1.4).²⁵ This ebullient melodic idea bounds up a fifth, outlining the tonic triad like a trumpet fanfare. Indeed, the singer’s triadic melody seems to spring directly from the pianist’s arpeggios, absorbing the energy of the surging accompaniment.²⁶ The third and fourth phrases reiterate the two-bar figure, compressing and intensifying the motivic development across the second half of the song. The fourth phrase ends by leaping a fifth to the climactic high A♭, unleashing the full energy of Fauré’s heraldic figure. The “Mai” motive also acquires fresh harmonic colors with each new variation. In the first phrase, it perches atop a tonic triad, colored by a descending inner line. In the second phrase, a subdominant inflection shades the harmony deliciously. The third phrase ventures into more distant keys as the motive repeats, depicting Hugo’s image of “The path that ends where the road begins.” Finally, the fourth phrase presents the motive in the relative minor with a faintly modal coloration.

EXAMPLE 1.4. Fauré, variation of a head motive across the first strophe of “Mai.”

a. First phrase, mm. 3–4.

b. Second phrase, mm. 11–12.

c. Third phrase, mm. 19–22.

d. Fourth phrase, mm. 27–31.

With his persistent, subtly varied motive, Fauré captured something of Hugo’s verve. New versions of the motive continually sprout from the melody like the poem’s cornucopian imagery. This sort of concentrated motivic development is absent from Fauré’s other Hugo settings and does not resurface until the 1870s when the composer turned to more serious verse. The motivic work in “Mai” exceeds the polite norms of song composition, gesturing toward the chamber and symphonic genres. We catch another glimpse of an elevated style behind the façade of the salon romance.