For the two songs of his opus 46, Faure chose two highly atmospheric poems, each of which presents its own challenges for a musical setting. The first poem, Les presents, by Villiers de l'Isle Adam, is moodily cryptic, and Faure preserved this by using a good deal of restraint in both piano and vocal lines, with just a hint of rising emotion in the rising vocal line and crescendo on "partager mes remords," before the setting returns to the graceful dignity that marks the beginning of the song. The Verlaine text, Claire de lune, has little in common with Les presents, being instead highly visual, evoking the spirit of a gauzy fantasy world, part pastoral, part 18th century, part medieval. The only thread linking the two poems is some level of ambiguity, though with the Verlaine it stems from ambivalence rather than obscurity. Here Faure, in one of his most famous settings, was far more direct, almost writing a minuet. He used a relatively long prelude from the piano to set the delicate and graceful mood, and the voice enters almost unobtrusively. It is not until the last verse, introduced by a piano section with considerably more bass than before, that the vocal lines become the primary focus, in the brief section describing the fountains' sobs of ecstasy. As the voice dies away, the piano resumes the theme that opened the song, but more briefly, and with a repeated descending line in the bass that did not appear in the prelude, capturing the hints of mingled emotions in the text.

Certainly Claire de lune is the more popular of the two; Faure was generally better at capturing a visual image or a mood in melody, rather than the deep exploration of a state of mind that the de l'Isle Adam text calls for. Nonetheless, the two pieces are both excellent illustrations of thoughtful illustrations of poems through musical settings.



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2.Clair de lune

In Fauré's setting of Les Présents—the first of his Two Songs, Op. 46 (1887)—Villiers de l'Isle Adam's elusive poetry seems to hover between joy and sadness, twilight, and myth. The Watteau paysage of its companion, Clair de lune—Fauré's first Verlaine setting—is enveloped in the moonlight of pure fantasy as archetypal stick-figure masqueraders "Play the lute and dance/And are almost sad under their fantastic disguises!" An impassive vocal line croons in merely occasional agreement with the piano's quasi-plucked accompaniment, which is caught up and engulfed in an archaic minuet which eventually gives way to arpeggiated rapport with the vocal line before the suddenly enchanted exclamation "Au calme clair de lune, triste et beau...." Soon, though, the minuet returns to reach its cadence.

Clair de lune represents Fauré's first excursion into the ideal landscape to which he would return several times as a supreme master of the mélodie—notably, in the Mélodies de Venise, Op. 58 (1891), La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1892-1894), and the fantastic divertissement Masques et bergamasques, Op. 112 (1919), in which Clair de lune would find its predestined place. By contrast, Debussy's second, more successful setting of Clair de lune, from his first collection of Fêtes galantes (1891), perhaps protests too much in sensuous striving to evoke a realm which Fauré calls up persuasively in a subtle, deceptively simple fait accompli.

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