Like many composers, Faure was consistently attracted by texts about the sea, or any other body of water (Au bord de l'eau, L'horizon chimerique, Les matelots, La fleur qui va sur l'eau, to name just a few), and in this text, the poet draws the parallel between the rocking of a ship and of a cradle, which Faure captured in his setting, one of his most haunting songs. The accompaniment carries this rocking theme steadily in a pensive minor, while the voice in the first verse quietly describes, without any particular "painting" except the simply rising and falling line, the ships in the harbor. In the second, the music becomes more emotional, in the crescendo to the long high notes and the dramatic octave descent, depicting the pull of the horizon. In the last verse, while the accompaniment returns to the rocking motif, the extended notes in the vocal line subtly portray the conflict that the text personifies in the boats, the desire to remain gently rocked in harbor.

Though the text of "Notre amour" describes "our love" as being, in turn, light, charming, sacred, infinite, and eternal, Faure does not, until the last verse, draw any major musical distinctions among these aspects, and the tone of the song is set in the first verse, the one that declares "our love is a light thing." The piano and vocal lines are both marked "leggieramente," appropriately enough, and the rippling triplets in the treble of the accompaniment emphasize this aspect. There are slight differences, particularly an unexpected modulation in the accompaniment, in the second verse, which is marked "sempre leggiero e legato," and the third verse, where one might expect some additional level of solemnity, is a repetition of the first. Ironically, the next verse, declaring "our love is an infinite thing," is not given the full expansion the first were given. The last verse is the climax of the song, with the two exultant reiterations of the words "notre amour" and the long, forte high A (or ad libitum high B). The overall effect is highly sentimental, but with a certain candor and freshness that (especially if the performers keep to the indicated allegretto tempo) keeps it from cloying.

Three is a number that keeps popping up in music, art, folklore, and legend, and Le secret, of course in three stanzas, focuses on sets of three: morning, day, and night, ignorance, proclamation of knowledge, and forgetfulness. Faure's remarkably efficient (just 34 bars) setting ties these concepts together, with a hushed opening stanza, suggesting the silent tear that dies away, the shy but proud exclamations of the second, with the expansive effects of crescendos and high notes on the words "proclame" and "ouvert," and the last starting and ending pianissimo, as though the night is carrying the secret away. While it is not his most technically sophisticated work, it is one of his finest in terms of capturing and conveying the mood of a text.



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1.Les berceaux

Gabriel Fauré's "Les berceaux," Op. 23/1 (1879), a setting of a poem by Sully Prudhomme, uses a flowing melodic line in the vocal part and a characteristic accompaniment in the piano to evoke the movement of both ships and of cradles (berceaux), linking the two together in motion and emotion.

The poem describes large ships rocked by the water and cradles rocked by women: "But the day of farewells will come, because women must weep, and curious men must dare the lure of the horizon." But though ships carry men away from their cradles, the ships sense, and are momentarily held back by, the soul of the cradles.

The song opens with the lulling motion of arpeggios in the piano bass line, underpinning a soothing, quietly sung vocal line. At the line "But the day of farewells will come, " a crescendo slowly builds to a forte climax on "dare the lure of the horizon." The piano leads the way back to the more flowing sprit of the opening, ending the song in the tone in which it began.

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2.Notre amour

Over a rapidly purling accompaniment in triplets, leggiero e legato, an effusively brilliant melodic line whips the clichés of Armand Silvestre's inclusive poem into a froth thrice repeated—"Our love is a light thing ... Our love is a charming thing ... Our love is a sacred thing ... "—before working the two final stanzas—"Our love is an infinite thing ... Our love is an eternal thing ... "—to a sweeping apotheosis rising to B above the staff. Repetition through the first three stanzas is justified by the intricacy of the melody, which teases the ear in such a way that one welcomes its return. One is thus prepared for the variations wrought upon it as Fauré rises to the notions of infinity and eternity. Composed about 1879, "Notre amour" is contemporary with the Ballade for piano and the Élégie for cello and piano while providing a scintillating foil for its opus companion, Les Berceaux. Which is to say that Notre amour catches Fauré in full stride as "the master of charms" (as Debussy somewhat slightingly called him) before his discovery of Paul Verlaine's poetry deepened and enriched his art.

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3.Le secret ('Je veux que le matin l'ignore le nom')

The scant thirty-four bars of Fauré's Le secret (1880 - 81) unfold with an adagio chordal accompaniment over which hovers an incantatory melody, like smoke from the censer evoked in the central climactic lines of Armand Silvestre's Parnassian poem:



I want the day to proclaim it,

The love that I hid in the morning,

And over my open heart, poised,

Like a grain of incense, to inflame it



The formal solemnity of the text is rippled with barely suppressed excitement, which Fauré expresses with serenely anxious modulations whose hymnic rapture expresses at once secrecy, sacredness, and, in its octave rise to "penché / Comme un grain d'encens," a triumphant proclamation. Where the opening wavers between major and lydian modality, the final pianissimo verse achieves unambiguous closure in the key of F major. While the song is technically undemanding, Fauré's subtle translation of the poem's conceit into pure music garlanded with exquisite vocal inflections calls for an interpretive artist of the first order. Small wonder that specialists of the mélodie so often include it in their programs.

Le secret was first sung by bass André Quirot at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on January 6, 1883.

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