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.
GENRE AND COUNTERPOINT
In “S’il est un charmant gazon,” his fifth song from Les chants du crépuscule, Fauré explored the expressive potential of counterpoint. Counterpoint here signifies not only the combination of melodic lines but also the relationship between the two performers. For the first time in Fauré’s songs, the piano ritornello plays a truly integrated role, becoming an inseparable part of the musical-poetic design. At a deeper level still, “S’il est un charmant gazon” presents a counterpoint of genres that crystallizes a particular moment in the history of French song.
Motivically, the ritornello and strophes of “S’il est un charmant gazon” are closely interrelated (see example 1.5). The piano and vocal melodies both fall into two-bar subphrases that descend to an accented passing tone, a sighing figure that permeates the entire song. The rising arpeggio in m. 2 also resembles a similar figure in the second half of the vocal strophes (see mm. 19 and 21). Yet the pentatonic piano arpeggio is obviously related to the common motive from “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” and “Mai,” which follows at the end of the ritornello. Clearly, Fauré did not compose the piano ritornello of “S’il est un charmant gazon” as an afterthought, as in the earlier songs. The ritornello develops material from previous songs and is integrated motivically with the vocal strophes.
The ritornello and strophes share another less noticeable structural feature. Fauré wrote the entire ritornello in strict four-part counterpoint, paying close attention to voice-leading. The first bar contains a voice exchange between the melody, which descends from F4 to D4, and the tenor voice in the left hand, which ascends from D3 to F3 in even quarter notes. The same voice exchange returns twice, each time a fifth higher, as the two-bar model repeats sequentially. The inner voice also returns at the cadence, where the alto line rises from D4 to F4.
We might overlook this voice-leading detail did it not return so strikingly in the strophes. The first two phrases begin with a voice exchange between the descending vocal line (C5 to A4) and the ascending alto line in the piano (A3 to C4). The bass line, meanwhile, rises in contrary motion against the voice as it falls from C5 to F4. The bass only climbs a fourth in the first phrase, reversing direction on B♭2, but in the consequent phrase it reaches C3, mirroring the singer’s fifth descent. This contrapuntal “consummation” immediately precedes the rhapsodic arpeggios, as if the rising bass line had released a new energy in the melody.
EXAMPLE 1.5. Fauré, “S’il est un charmant gazon,” mm. 1–24.
EXAMPLE 1.5. (continued)
The