Though several of Fauré's smaller pieces, upon which his fame largely rests—Papillon, for instance—owe their existence to the mercenary promptings of his publisher, a few are abreath with the subtle poetry which entered his music with his discovery of Verlaine in 1888. This is quite pronounced in the Romance for cello and piano of 1894. In addition to a surprising number of self-borrowings, Fauré returned unconsciously throughout his career to a cluster of basic melodic shapes, or archetypes (albeit enriched by his felicitous invention), which suggests a conception of his art as a closed universe with finite themes and labyrinthine variations. In a thank-you note of late October 1889 to Countess Élisabeth Greffuhle for a stay at her chateau, Bois-Boudran, Fauré confides that "I was looking for a really piercing musical phrase, a piece of Venetian moonlight, for Shylock and I found it! It was the air I breathed in your park that brought it to me. . . . " It is heard in the solo violin of Shylock's little Nocturne. But it was a phrase he was to happen upon again in other guises—in the opening of the mélodie Soir (also 1894), in Exaucement (the first mélodie of Le Jardin clos [1914])—and most nakedly as the opening cello melody of the Romance. Alternately scalar and arpeggiated, this upwardly reaching phrase leads into a long, effusively dreaming cantilena belonging to the twin worlds of Shylock and Masques et bergamasques. The "Venetian" phrase appears again midway through to usher in the cantilena's reprise, and yet again as the coda. With some reticence, Fauré's working title for this distilled master miniature was Andante, which his publisher changed to the more suggestive Romance when he issued it in 1895. As such, the Romance had its première November 14, 1894, in Geneva at a Fauré Festival organized by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze.

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