"The fact of the matter is that I'm having an excellent holiday, feeling better than I have ever felt before, and filling my eyes with marvelous things and my mind with delightful memories! I certainly lack the peace and quiet I need for work, and the little something I've sketched out to some lines by Verlaine may possibly turn out well once I am back at my desk in Paris. ... " Fauré wrote this to his confidante, Marguerite Baugnies, from Venice in June 1891. In fact, Mandoline was finished and En Sourdine nearly complete; back in Paris, finishing touches were put to the latter, Green followed in July, A Clymène came over July and August, and C'est l'extase over August and September. The Cinq Mélodies "de Venise," to poems by Verlaine, are dedicated to Mme la Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Fauré's hostess during his Venetian stay between mid-May and mid-July—a time of renewal snatched from the grind of daily duties and career building.

The Princesse de Polignac (1865-1943), née Winnaretta Eugénie Singer, heiress to the sewing machine fortune, was not merely a wealthy woman who commissioned such central modern works as Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Satie's Socrate, Stravinsky's Renard, de Falla's El Retablo de Maese Pedro, Weill's Symphony No. 2, and Poulenc's Organ Concerto; she was also an animatrice—one who moves and inspires others. Fauré's junior by 20 years, in 1891 she was an attractive and astute woman in her mid-twenties, and Fauré was infatuated with her. His initial Verlaine settings—Clair de lune in 1887 and Spleen ("Il pleure dans mon coeur") the year following—persuaded her that he was Verlaine's ideal interpreter and, both before and after their Venetian excursion, she pressed for a collaboration. Sadly, Verlaine had already become the absinthe-besotted débauché of legend and Fauré's several visits to him in the hospital resulted only in the wily poet extracting 100 francs at a time from the composer. Fauré played the organ at Verlaine's funeral in 1896. Meanwhile, the prospect of collaboration had sent Fauré back to the poems—with startling consequences.

The Cinq Mélodies form a genuine cycle—Fauré's first—in which themes from previous mélodies return subtly varied. The Watteau paysage evoked by the piano's staccato in Mandoline becomes the scene for four very different expressions of love—a dreamlike incantation in En Sourdine, shyly effusive in Green (as the lover offers the beloved fruit and flowers), an apparition of the beloved presaged by "Mystiques barcarolles, / Romances sans paroles. ... " in A Clymène, before the passionate sensuality of C'est l'extase clinches all. In this "Venetian" music, Fauré's art opens to a new opulence, a passionately crooning lyricism sublimated by musical cunning of a rare order, suffused with incandescent exhilaration.

Though no doubt heard in the salons well before, the Cinq Mélodies "de Venise" were given their premiere by Proust's friend, the tenor Maurice Bagès, at a Société Nationale concert of April 2, 1892.

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1.Mandoline

Mandoline is the first of Gabriel Fauré's Mélodies (5) de Venise (Five Venetian Melodies), and in fact, the only one of the five to truthfully lay claim to its eponymous provenance: Fauré completed the song in the summer of 1891 during a stay in Venice, but wrote the rest of the songs in the cycle, and published the set, later that year in Paris. At any rate, the entire cycle bears the unmistakably French character of Fauré's adventurous but never overbearing harmonies, his translucent textures, and his emotionally direct melodic contours. The text, like the others in the cycle, is taken from Paul Verlaine, whose poems make up a large portion of the words set to music by fin de siècle composers. (Mandoline, in fact, had already been set by Debussy a year before Fauré's Mélodies (5)). Fauré uses the song to inaugurate his cycle with a bright, nimble mood (contrasting sharply, for example, with the textural moiré and veiled gestures of the second song, En sourdine). Repeated chords and jaunty rhythms form the core of the accompaniment, undergirding a lyrical line in the voice. Though Fauré generally shied away from blatant tone painting, the rhythmic character and plucky articulation of the piano clearly evoke the serenade singers described by Verlaine. The mood is light, as the poet notices figures in the crowd, describes their clothes, and gives listeners a glimpse of personality; the poem, as a character scene, offers Fauré the kind of poetic obligation he most enjoys meeting: a study in the evocation of subtle metaphor and the acute emotional resonance of a fluid narrative. As the scene progresses, Fauré extends the curve of his melodic arcs and infuses his harmonic progressions with greater leeway—the mandolin itself finally making its premiere in Verlaine's fourth stanza; but in the end, Fauré returns to the light texture and coyly self-conscious prattle of the opening verse.

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2.En sourdine

The majority of works in Gabriel Fauré's extensive body of solo songs were written as individual pieces, concentrated evocations of solitary moods and notions. A number of Fauré's songs, however, are gathered into extended cycles with a broader aesthetic scope. To this latter group belongs En sourdine, the second of Fauré's Mélodies (5) "de Venice," Op. 58 (Five Venetian Melodies). The cycle was undertaken in the summer of 1891 in the city of its name and was later completed Paris—the title referring not to the provenance of the tunes themselves, but to the composer's location at the time he commenced work on them. In fact, Fauré probably did not begin composing En sourdine until he was back in Paris, an observation that only highlights the lack of particularly Italianate features in the music and the overwhelmingly French character of both the text and its setting. The words of En sourdine, like those of the other songs in the cycle, are those of the eminent poet Paul Verlaine, a writer especially favored by Fauré (as well as others—at least ten settings exist of this poem alone). Fauré's selection of the poem, and his musical realization of it, evince the frequent observation that the composer often sought out texts with deliberately vague narrative trajectories and few pictoriable images, choosing instead poems that conveyed vivid but ineffable images through veiled webs of connotation, undulating phonetic surfaces, and amorphous analogies. The title, after all, translates as muted, and the first strophe seeks after the "profound silence" to be found in nature. A breeze blows throughout the score, with its constant rising and falling arpeggios, even though it appears in the text only near the end. The undulating textures and drifting harmonies underscore the sensorial detachment and sense of abandon in Verlaine's poem, which speaks of "half-light," "eyes half closed," and "vague weariness." The penultimate stanza, "persuaded by the softly rocking breeze," musters a hint of volition in the form of a meandering countermelody in the piano that escapes from the accompanimental texture and floats upward into the singer's company before receding again into the song's quieting final bars. Fauré characteristically leaves the poem's final, poignant image unsullied by musical tethers: as Verlaine said and Fauré concurred, only after the darkness falls, represented by the singer's last strains and the disappearance of the piano's hushed final chords, will the nightingale sing.

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