The text for "Chanson du pecheur," a poem by Théophile Gauthier, is written in a strophic form, and for the first two verses, Fauré followed the strophic structure, making the song into a slow lament. However, for the third verse, he breaks up the text more dramatically, with an almost Italiante feel to the music. He avoids the standard use of dynamics here—the line "Et combien je l'amais" (and how much I love her) is marked piano, leading to the forte and impassioned "Je n'aimerai jamais une femme autant qu'elle" (I will never love another woman like her), but instead of the expected diminuendo ending with the repeated refrain, the dynamics remain steady. These unexpected touches give the song an immediate and direct emotional impact.

"Lydia" stands in distinct contrast to "Chanson du pecheur," possessing the delicately expressed sensuality commonly associated with Fauré. There is even a hidden joke in the setting; the key is F, but the music features B natural rather than B flat—in other words, Fauré uses the Lydian mode. Also unlike "Chanson du pecheur," there is no obvious emotional or musical climax, and the dynamics change very infrequently, and then only from piano to mezzo forte. The accompaniment is equally light, with the same clarity the vocal lines display.

© Anne Feeney, All Music Guide

1.Chanson du pêcheur ('Ma belle amie est morte')

Berlioz famously set Théophile Gautier's lament for lost love ("Into the grave she takes with her my soul") under the title Sur les lagunes, the most dramatic and pictorially suggestive mélodie of Les Nuits d'été (1841). Fauré's ca. 1872 setting of the same text is rather wan in comparison, though in the development of his style it represents a considerable achievement. Over the piano's triplet arpeggios , which economically evoke a barcarolle-like swell of waves, a quiet, insinuating, dolce melody traces the fisherman's despair ("Oh how everything in nature seems to me to be in mourning!") through two stanzas, rising to a crescendo at the refrain: "How bitter is my fate! Alas, to go over the sea without love!" New, more urgent melodic material carries the third stanza as "the immensity of night spreads like a shroud," until the refrain returns with vehemence and the triplets sink diminuendo to a bare octave in the bass. In its compact shapeliness, supple melody, and somber expressiveness, La Chanson du pêcheur is a true mélodie, transcending the salon fare in which the composer's early songs, however fastidious, often seem immured.

Chanson du pecheur is dedicated to the great Spanish-French mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, in whom Berlioz himself, in his last decade, discovered his vocal ideal. This dedication proved prophetic, for Fauré, having been adopted by the Viardot household in the early 1870s, fell desperately in love with Pauline's daughter, Marianne, and, with the help of another family friend, the Russian novelist Turgenev, persuaded her to enter into an engagement in July 1877— which the girl broke off in October, devastating the young composer and propelling him into years of depression. Fauré, looking back with a lifetime's hindsight, confided to his son that "That break may not have been a bad thing for me, because in the dear surroundings of the Viardot home I would have been persuaded to alter my course"—that is, to put aside the intimate, refined world of his mélodies and chamber music in pursuit of success on the operatic stage.

© All Music Guide

2.Lydia

Fauré has long been criticized for sullying his otherwise esteemed body of art songs with settings of poems by inferior authors. His settings of Verlaine, for example, are among his most beloved. But other poems, such as that used in Lydia, the second song for voice and piano from Gabriel Fauré's Op. 2, are regarded more coolly in academic circles. This, of course, unfairly projects modern tastes onto fin de siècle culture, and at any rate fails to address the innovations and seminal stylistic characteristics that this early song exhibits. The text, taken from Leconte de Lisle, plays on the ageless European literary conceit of using "death" or "dying" as a euphemism for the erotic. The poet hardly casts the image as a metaphor, describing a "death" imposed by the physical beauty of the beloved. Fauré, on the other hand, paces the dramatic curve of the song, with its hushed repeated chords and chromatic chord progressions growing more intense as the singer's melody arches ever higher. The song, of course, reaches its zenith at the moment of death: "Oh Lydia, return my life to me/That I might die, die forever." Fauré's biographers and others, recognizing the composer's penchant for self-borrowing, have traced the vocal melody of Lydia, with its stepwise ascents and descents and subsequent scalar figure that together chart an underlying upward incline, through nearly four decades of Fauré's oeuvre: first in "La lune blanche" from La bonne chanson (1893), then Act III of Prométhée (1900), and finally, the Kyrie from Messe basse (1906). Scholar Carlo Caballero, for example, traces Fauré's frequent use of the sharped-fourth scale degree or (appropriately enough) Lydian mode to this early song. These borrowings beg no particular cross-readings or intertextual connections, but, intentionally explicit or not, rather point up the general stylistic consistency one finds throughout Fauré's work, beginning with these early songs.

© All Music Guide