Читать книгу The Faure Song Cycles - Stephen Rumph - Страница 18

In 1852 Leconte de Lisle published his Poèmes antiques from which Fauré derived three mélodies. The poet suffered the sense of alienation that afflicted many artists after the disappointing revolutions of 1848–49. Leconte de Lisle loathed the modern world and found solace in Greek, Roman, and Hindu antiquity. His epic verse portrays world-weary ascetics, followers of dispossessed gods, and dying sages, all symbols of the poet’s mal du siècle. He would even dip into Norse mythology, writing “La mort de Sigurd” and “La légende des Nornes” (Poèmes barbares, 1862). Yet Leconte de Lisle and Richard Wagner offered opposing antidotes to modernity: whereas Wagner aimed at emotional immediacy and disdained formal artifice, Leconte de Lisle strove for impassivity and embraced an exacting formalism. His programmatic poem “Vénus de Milo” expresses this detached aestheticism:

Du bonheur impassible ô symbole adorable,

Calme comme la Mer en sa sérénité,

Nul sanglot n’a brisé ton sein inaltérable,

Jamais les pleurs humains n’ont terni ta beauté.

Oh, captivating symbol of impassive bliss,

Calm as the serene Sea,

No sob has burst from your immutable breast,

Never have human tears tarnished your beauty.

Leconte de Lisle rejected the autobiographical candor of the Romantics as well as their social commitment. Condemned to a prosaic age and politically impotent, the modern poet’s sole redemption lay in the study of healthier epochs. As Leconte de Lisle counseled his fellow poets in the preface to Poèmes antiques, “You are also destined, under pain of complete effacement, to isolate yourselves in the contemplative and learned life as in a sanctuary of repose and purification.”¹⁰ The young poets who flocked to Leconte de Lisle’s salon eventually published three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866, 1871, 1876) and even had their own house publisher, Alphonse Lemerre.

José-Maria de Heredia summoned classical antiquity most imposingly in Les trophées, a collection of 121 sonnets that he eventually published in 1893. The opening sonnet, “L’oubli” (Oblivion), captures the historical nostalgia that haunted the Parnassians:

Le temple est en ruine au haut du promontoire.

Et la Mort a mêlé, dans ce fauve terrain,

Les Déesses de marbre et les Héros d’airain

Dont l’herbe solitaire ensevelit la gloire.

Seul, parfois, un bouvier menant ses buffles boire,

De sa conque où soupire un antique refrain

Emplissant le ciel calme et l’horizon marin,

Sur l’azur infini dresse sa forme noire.

La Terre maternelle et douce aux anciens Dieux

Fait à chaque printemps, vainement éloquente,

Au chapiteau brisé verdir une autre acanthe;

Mais l’Homme indifférent au rêve des aïeux

Écoute sans frémir, du fond des nuits sereines,

La Mer qui se lamente en pleurant les Sirènes.

The temple lies in ruins atop the promontory.

And Death has mingled, in this tawny landscape,

The marble Goddesses and the bronze Heroes

Whose glory lies buried beneath the lonely grass.

All the while, a lone cowherd who leads his buffaloes to water

And fills with his conch, sighing an ancient refrain,

The calm sky and sea horizon,

Raises his dark form against the infinite azure.

The Earth, maternal and sweet to the ancient Gods,

Each spring with vain eloquence

Bedecks the broken capital with a green acanthus;

But Man, indifferent to his ancestor’s dreams,

Hears without shivering, in the depths of the serene nights,

The Sea that tearfully laments its lost Sirens.

Heredia’s elegy mourns the disenchantment of nature and mankind’s indifference to bygone glory. Yet it holds out hope for modernity. The sonnet turns upon the image of the acanthus: both natural plant and inspiration for the Corinthian column, the acanthus symbolizes the regenerative power of ancient art. Modern poets may yet recapture the lost music of the Sirens as they immerse themselves in antiquity.

The sonnet, with its demanding rhyme scheme, provided an ideal vehicle for the Parnassian craftsmen. They found paragons of formal perfection in the jeweled miniatures of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852). Gautier’s concluding poem, “L’Art,” distills the formalist creed:

Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent.	The gods themselves die,
Mais les vers souverains	But the sovereign verses
Demeurent	Endure
Plus forts que les airains.	Stronger than bronze.
Sculpte, lime, ciselle;	Sculpt, file, chisel;
Que ton rêve flottant	Let your floating dream
Se scelle	Be sealed
Dans le bloc résistant!	In the resisting block!

The Parnassians emulated Gautier’s chiseled verse as they rejected the negligent flow of Romantic poetry in favor of more concentrated structures. Characteristic, too, is Gautier’s dense rhyming—both the rich rhyme of “meurent”/“demeurent” (three shared sounds instead of the normal two) and the sonorous near rhyme of “ciselle”/“Se scelle.” So highly did the Parnassians value rhyme that scholar Jean Martino could speak of a “cult of rich rhyme.”¹¹ Théodore de Banville emphatically gave rhyme pride of place in his Petit traité de poésie française (1891), the bible of Parnassian poetics: “In every poem, the good construction of the phrase is in direct proportion to the richness of the rhyme.”¹² An anonymous parody of the Parnassian school, Le Parnassiculet contemporain (1867), included a droll lampoon of their compact and fastidiously rhymed verse:

LE MARTYRE DE SAINT LABRE

SONNET EXTRÊMEMENT RYTHMIQUE

Labre,

Saint

Glabre,

Teint

Maint

Sabre,

S’cabre,

Geint!

Pince,

Fer

Clair!

Grince,

Chair

Mince!¹³

The rigid structures of Parnassian poetry were a rebuke to the fluidity and emotionalism of Romanticism. Sculpture was the dominant artistic metaphor for the Parnassians, and their verse abounds with female statues, especially the Venus de Milo. As Gretchen Schultz explained, “Behind the Parnassian quest for formal stasis, then, lies a desperate attempt to reclaim the poetic act for masculinity and to render poetry, as a metaphor for femininity, unchanging and fixed beyond time.”¹⁴ The Parnassian ethic demanded that poets cleanse their work of emotion and sublimate personal experience in objective form.

This aesthetic had particular relevance for Fauré in 1878 following his broken engagement to Marianne Viardot, the daughter of his famous patroness, opera diva Pauline Viardot. Marianne accepted his proposal in July 1877, and the composer’s letters overflow with an extravagant, almost manic enthusiasm. As he wrote on August 19: “I am anxious for your assurance that you have forgotten how turbulent and touchy my love for you has been these last few days. The more I carry on, the less clearly do I understand this inexplicable agitation that comes from deep within me! I can no longer sleep because of it!”¹⁵ Or in a letter of August 26: “You cannot suspect that it is all I can do to prevent myself sobbing fit to split the rocks open every time I write to you.”¹⁶ Daunted by this onslaught, Marianne broke off the engagement after only three months, leaving Fauré devastated. Poème d’un jour undoubtedly responded to that trauma, as Nectoux and others have suggested, yet the work transcends autobiographical confession.¹⁷ As the poet-protagonist passes from unbridled passion to philosophical resignation, he realizes the Parnassian ideal of impassivity. The song cycle not only sublimates personal tragedy but also grants that experience an enduring artistic form.

Fauré’s sympathy with the Parnassian aesthetic appears fully blown in his first Leconte de Lisle setting, “Lydia.” This exquisite mélodie, written around 1870, haunted Fauré’s music till the end of his career and even appears as a leitmotive in La bonne chanson.¹⁸ “Lydia” also provided the direct model for “Adieu,” the final song of Poème d’un jour. A close reading of poem and song will illuminate Fauré’s affinity with the Parnassian poets, which lies, above all, in a shared historical vision.