The Verlaine period of Faure

French Melodie
Zachary Beeksma
March 22, 2015
Faures songwriting is broken in to four periods, the first two are represented
by two collections of songs which Faure published. The contents of the first of these
collections were written beginning in 1870 and the collection was published in 1878.
This set is characterized by relatively simple pieces, somewhat reminiscent of a
mid-century salon song. Lydia (1870) is representative of this first collection. This
piece has a stable hymnodic rhythm, which is counterbalanced by a slightly
unstable harmonic sequence. Faure removes the sense of the barline by obscuring
the natural accents of the meter, which allows the momentum of the French text to
move forward more easily. In this Parnassian text, the character of Lydia is being
idealized and there is a clear distance between the speaker of the poem and the
subject. Even in these seemingly simple songs, there is a constant pull between
stabilizing and destabilizing factors.
The second collection was composed during the following decade and
consists of slightly more expansive works. He begins to use more of the piano in
the accompaniments and often uses running 16 th note patterns. These songs have
expanded vocal ranges and Faure seems to respond to the French text on a more
expressive and coloristic level as well as at the structural level that we see in the
first collection. Nell (1878) is a representative piece from this collection. In this
work, Faure uses running 16th note patters in the accompaniment and is more

inventive harmonically than one would expect from the first collection. This piece
also has more surprising turns of phrase and less symmetrical phrases.
The Verlaine period began with Cinq Melodies de Venise which Faure
composed in 1891, followed by La Bonne Chanson in 1892-94. The texts for these
pieces came from Verlaines third major collection of poems, also titled La Bonne
Chanson. These poems were a somewhat over the top set of love letters written
for his upcoming wedding. Verlaines earlier works show more Parnassian influence
in the manner that he distances the reader and often obscures the object of the
poem. In this collection, however, the object is clearly present.
In La Lune Blanche, Verlaine sets up an intimate calmness. He breaks the
poem into four syllable lines, which are then further broken apart by how he
separates the stanzas. He sets up three stanzas of 5 lines, the 5 th line of each
stanza ends in an ellipsis, and each stanza is then followed by a single line. In some
ways, this seems reminiscent of the way in which one might speak to a lover; late at
night out amongst the trees and the stars. It seems as if the speaker is lingering on
each detail, rather than piecing multiple thoughts into a line as one might expect.
The poem uses a regular rhyme scheme. Each stanza is ABABC and the lone
following line C. This rhyme scheme, along with how lines 6, 12, and 18 are
separated, brings the readers attention clearly to those lines. From a prose
standpoint, each stanza is one sentence that ends with that stanzas trailing line.
In the first stanza, Verlaine sets the scene of a night in the woods, however
he doesnt give the object of the poem until line 6. In fact, the first stanza leaves
the reader unsure as to the tone of the piece. We see the white moonlight in the
woods, and the narrator seems to hear his beloved all around. The reader is still
unsure whether she is present. Perhaps the beloved has passed and the narrator is

lamenting her absence. The white moonlight could easily represent the coolness of
death, and the trees could be reminding the narrator of his ever absent lover.
In the second stanza, Verlaine continues the description of the forest, and
again the tone of the poem is unclear. Lines 7-11 describe a cleanly manicured
forest. The pond reflects/like a deep mirror tied with beneath the arbor (line 5),
evokes the image of a beautiful place. Somewhere more reminiscent of the gardens
of the nobility than some unkempt wilderness. In this stanza, Verlaine uses still
more symbolism of sadness and death the silhouette/of the black willow/where the
wind weeps. At this point, Verlaine again ends the stanza with an ellipsis, the
reader is left feeling that the narrator has certainly undergone loss. However, in
line 12, the narrator speaks to the object of the poem for the first time, we see that
his poem is not indeed a lament. He says Let us dream. It is the hour. (perhaps
let us daydream?) The narrator is speaking to his beloved in the present tense, as if
she were present with him in the woods. Rather than lamenting the loss of his
beloved, the narrator is preparing to leave some unfortunate happening behind and
dream of the future with his lover. This line is the turning point of the poem.
The third stanza no longer describes the quality of the forest, but rather the
feeling that the couple is experiencing. A vast and tender/peacefulness/seems to
descend/from the firmament/made iridescent by the stars (or perhaps other
heavenly body). In this stanza, Verlaine doesnt describe the scenery, and I think
this may be because the trajectory of the poem has changed. Rather than living in
the white moonlight or weeping wind through the willow, the narrator (and perhaps
lover) have decided to dream. This leads to a vast and tender peacefulness, which
changes the entire nature of the forest and seems to descend even from the sky.
The poem ends with the last, single line it is the exquisite hour, which emphasizes

the beauty of the narrator and beloveds ability to dream beyond their
circumstances.
This poem demonstrates Verlaines interest in a sense of escapism. He sets
up a scene of despair and then turns the reader abruptly to a scene of hope. In the
poem, the narrator seems to have the charge of convincing the beloved that it is
indeed the time to dream and move on from this sorrow (or languishing?). Perhaps
this is related to Verlaines relationship with his new, young wife, the object of this
collection of poetry. Perhaps he is in the role of enticing her out of her
circumstances. Perhaps, he is even painting her circumstances dark in order to
encourage her to go forward with him.
Throughout this poem, Verlaine distances the speaking of the narrator from
the rest of the poem, both visually (through spacing on the page), with the ellipsis,
and with the rhyme scheme. In fact, one could read the remaining lines as a poem
on their own. Without lines 6, 12, and 18, we have a poem that evokes the sense of
peace that comes at the end of a requiem or in the aftermath of a tragedy. As a
separate thread, we see the narrators entreaties to his beloved. In this way, we
see that even in a poem that is rather more direct than much of Verlaines work, he
still uses distancing mechanisms to remove the drama from the scene.
In his setting of this text, Faure reacts to Verlaines division of the text.
Almost exclusively, each of Verlaines four syllable lines is set as its own unit. Even
in the cases in which Faure connects two o these lines, the setting seems to rebegin the line, rather than continuing in one long-breathed thought. These short,
almost undulating feeling units of melody, still have the feeling of French legato that
one can find in Faures other music, however often they seem more like short
microcosms of line, especially in the setting of the second stanza of text.

Faure also reacts to how the lines of the narrator are separated in the poem.
In this setting, he elongates and separates out bien-aime through both a meter
change and a change in the harmonic rhythm. He slows the ever-changing
harmonic basis, and stays in one tonality until the beginning of the next stanza of
text. He separates Rvons, cest lheure in a similar way. That stanza had been
moving largely in quarter and eighth notes, and suddenly the movement slows to
dotted half notes. The harmonic rhythm also slows at this point. This section had
been moving harmonies at about 1 per measure and suddenly he lingers for two
bars. The last statement Cest lheure exquise is the most separate, partly as it is
the end of the piece. This statement comes after three bars of rest, which is the
longest period of rest in the entire piece.
In the poem, I see these three statements as moments of stability. Both in
terms of how they seem to stand on their own, and, in that, the dreaming of the
narrator and his beloved seem to be related to a longing for stability. In the Faure,
setting, these moments feels stable, and he allows the harmony to settle for a
moment.
Throughout this piece, Faure moves harmonic centers relatively quickly. I feel
as if the tonality doesnt really settle until the end of the piece. The piece is
bookended by the same tonality, and much as the poem doesnt immediately feel
unsettled, the harmonic structures dont start really shifting until the fifth bar. While
the tonality doesnt feel settled, I dont every feel shocked by the harmonies.
Faure uses the piano as a second voice. I can hear a clear melody in the
piano interludes and in sections while the voice is singing, and even though the
piece begins with a fairly sedate, repetitive piano introduction, as the piece builds,
the piano has more to say. The piano sets up a triplet based accompaniment that

stays until the last 15 bars. The texture of the piece also feels largely the same
until these last bars as well. The texture does thicken a bit in the middle of the
piece, just as the poem goes through a turning point, and the reader begins to see
the layers of the beginning stanzas.