soul has more fire than you have ashes!
My heart has more love than you have oblivion!
Hugo’s syntax complements the theme of the poem, the victory of love over time and mortality. The first three stanzas dwell on the beloved, lingering over her hands, her breath, her eyes, her mouth. The massive prolongation of the sentence immerses the reader in the lover’s experience of time, his sense of desire and unsatisfied longing. In the fourth stanza, the lover asserts his triumph over time as he issues commands to the passing years. Having tasted of the beloved, he no longer fears decay and oblivion, and the stabilized syntax reflects his newfound peace. The last lines of the poem, finally, encapsulate the entire progression of thought, reversing the structure of the opening sentence. Each antithesis begins with a main clause exalting immortal love and ends with a subordinate clause mocking Father Time.
Fauré’s setting shows little concern with the overall form of Hugo’s poem. The composer chose a da capo form that obscures the crucial turn between the third and fourth stanzas:
The modulation to A minor does not correspond to any break in Hugo’s text, and the turn to the fourth stanza is buried within the B section, marked only by a brief feint toward F major. The da capo form also imposes a symmetry at odds with Hugo’s dynamic trajectory. Fauré’s setting of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” makes a shapely lyric piece but disregards the larger form of Hugo’s poem.
Nevertheless, at the local level “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” shows a keen awareness of Hugo’s syntax. Fauré’s vocal melody is an exercise in unfulfilled yearning worthy of Wagner (see example 1.3). The phrases rise insistently, crest on aching dissonances, then sink back to the starting point. The singer’s first eight bars press against the upper tonic and third, but fall back each time to the dominant. The following eight bars break through this ceiling with a leap to high A, but the melody again descends to the dominant, lingering deliciously over several dissonant passing tones. To enhance the upward surge of the melody, Fauré began each phrase of the song with an upbeat. This means that the vocalist sings “puis-que” eight times, an apparent gaffe that surpasses anything in “Le papillon et la fleur.” As in the previous song, however, Fauré’s concern lay with the larger shape of the line: by denying the natural trochaic rhythm (“puis-que”), he allowed the melody to flow restlessly toward its unattainable goals.
Fauré’s phrase structure projects the same sense of deferred resolution. The first sixteen bars form a sentence, as Arnold Schoenberg and Erwin Ratz dubbed this thematic type: after a pair of identical four-bar phrases, an eight-bar continuation leads to a half cadence.23 Unlike the period (ABABʹ), with its balanced antecedent and consequent, the AAB sentence creates a sense of propulsion and dynamic movement. Indeed, Fauré’s sentence perfectly matches Hugo’s first stanza, which also begins with two parallel clauses (lines 1 and 2) and continues with an expanded clause (3–4). Moreover, the sentence belongs to a larger compound form, functioning as the antecedent of a thirty-two-bar period that does not reach a full cadence until almost halfway through the song. This massive deferral of harmonic closure creates a sense of postponed desire that perfectly matches Hugo’s syntactic strategy, at least in his first three stanzas.
As in “Le papillon et la fleur,” Fauré left a clue to his reading in a short piano prelude that again seems to gloss Hugo’s poetic structure. The eight-bar prelude is a duet in imitative counterpoint supported by pizzicato chords in the left hand. The melody and harmony derive from the continuation of the singer’s melody (mm. 17–18), indicating that Fauré again composed the vocal strophes first and wrote the prelude as an afterthought. The harmony of the prelude is a model of hypotactic construction. Instead of beginning on the tonic, it descends gradually through the circle of fifths, beginning on vii, the most distant point. The subtonic triad, with its diminished fifth, is also the most dissonant in the diatonic collection. Until the final cadence, moreover, the prelude consists entirely of seventh chords that heighten the harmonic instability. The tonality itself remains in doubt through the first four bars, whose oscillation between bø7 and E7 implies a resolution to A minor. Clarity emerges gradually in mm. 5–8, which complete the descent through the fifth cycle (a7-d7-G7-C). Fauré’s prelude thus creates a neat harmonic analogue to Hugo’s hypotactic design. Like the poem, it begins from a point of instability and uncertainty, with the harmonic equivalent of subordinate clauses, and generates maximal tension before resolving. Once again, we perceive an urbane grasp of Hugo’s art beneath the naïve veneer of the romance.
EXAMPLE 1.3. Fauré, “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” mm. 1–40.
EXAMPLE 1.3. (continued)
EXAMPLE 1.3. (continued)
RHETORIC AND MOTIVE
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!