Читать книгу The Faure Song Cycles - Stephen Rumph - Страница 17

Fauré’s first song cycle has always fared better with the public than with critics. He composed the popular Poème d’un jour in 1878, thirteen years before he embarked on his six mature cycles. The three settings of poet Charles Grandmougin trace a brief love affair from infatuation (“Rencontre”) to rejection (“Toujours”) to resigned acceptance (“Adieu”). Musically, the songs cohere through a network of shared motives, piano figurations, and harmonic structures. The keys of Fauré’s autograph also follow a logical tonal plan from D♭ major to F♯ minor to G♭ major—enharmonically, a V-i progression followed by a major-minor shift. (The tonal scheme is even clearer in the 1880 first edition, which transposes the autograph keys to B major, E minor, and E major.) Yet despite the evident care that Fauré devoted to Poème d’un jour, critics have rated the work as little more than a fashionable pastiche. Vladimir Jankélévitch found no musical integration but only “the unity of a sort of sentimental biography.”¹ As Robert Orledge remarked less charitably, “The only common factor of the three op. 21 songs is their relative mediocrity.”² The obvious connection between the romantic narrative and Fauré’s broken engagement of 1877 has also tempted scholars to collapse the cycle into autobiography.³ Above all, critics have faulted a theatrical quality in the first two songs of Poème d’un jour—“much to the taste of singers” was Charles Kœchlin’s discreet phrase.⁴ Jankélévitch objected to “the insincerity of the emotion,” and even the sympathetic Émile Vuillermoz confessed to hearing “more than a hint of the dramatic stage.”⁵

A more serious interpretation emerges, however, if we take seriously Fauré’s title and read the cycle as a reflection on poiesis, the making of art. While the origin of Grandmougin’s three unpublished poems remains unknown, the title of the cycle clearly nods to a musical contemporary. Jules Massenet had recently composed a series of “poem” song cycles that trace similar tales of ephemeral love: Poème d’avril (1866), Poème d’octobre (1877), and Poème du souvenir (1878). The final song of Poème d’avril bears a particularly suggestive epigraph:

Nous nous sommes aimés trois jours:

Trois jours elle me fut fidèle.

Trois jours. ___La constance éternelle,

Et les éternelles amours!

We loved each other three days:

Three days she was faithful to me.

Three days. ___Eternal constancy,

And eternal love!

Grandmougin’s poems have not turned up in any collection or periodical, so it remains unclear whether he wrote them for Fauré or if the composer assembled them himself.⁶ In either case, Massenet’s cycles provide an instructive foil for Poème d’un jour. Fauré’s cycle departs most strikingly from his models in identifying the protagonist as a poet—the “poète isolé,” as he calls himself in the first song. The cycle thus seems to invite an allegorical reading, a metapoetic interpretation that reaches beyond the trivial love story.

In fact, both the text and music of Poème d’un jour resonate compellingly with the leading poetic movement of the time, Parnassianism. The Parnassian school, named for Mount Parnassus, the home of the ancient Greek muses, dominated French poetry during the Second Empire and well into the 1880s. Almost every notable poet of the later nineteenth century appeared in the eponymous anthology Le Parnasse contemporain alongside minor figures like Grandmougin.⁷ The 1866 inaugural volume established Parnassus as the driving force of French poetry, and Fauré vigorously embraced the new movement. Between 1868 and 1884, in addition to Poème d’un jour, he set three poems by Leconte de Lisle, the leader of the Parnassian poets; four by Théophile Gautier, their spiritual mentor, whose verse heads the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain; three poems by the movement’s quirky philosopher, Sully Prudhomme; and ten by Armand Silvestre, cited in a notable 1882 essay as one of the four “chefs d’école” of Parnassus.⁸ Fauré was indeed “caught up in the Parnassian period movement,” as Nectoux noted, yet his relation to that movement remains almost entirely unexamined.⁹

This chapter explores Poème d’un jour as a manifestation, or perhaps even a manifesto, of Parnassian aesthetics. As I shall argue, the work constitutes a sort of Bildungsgedicht, a coming-of-age poem in which the protagonist passes through trials to reach artistic maturity. This reading helps explain Fauré’s curious rigor in crafting the song cycle, a genre to which he would not return until 1891. It also makes sense of the theatricality of “Rencontre” and “Toujours”: far from betraying a lapse of taste, the flamboyant style sets off the Olympian restraint of “Adieu.” Coming at a pivotal moment in Fauré’s career, Poème d’un jour marks a break with his youthful apprenticeship and announces his new mastery as a composer. It also provides a barometer of the music-text relationship at this stage in his songwriting career.