The Prudhomme text set in the first song is essentially a banal description of a banal concept—water and clouds all float by but "our love" remains. Even though it was written relatively early in his career, and he had not yet completely developed his own style, Faure's setting manages to combine the obvious with the more subtle, and so the song has some of the originality lacking in the text. Both the voice and the accompaniment evoke the flowing water the text describes, with quavers suggesting ripples on the water, but occasionally the melodic focus is passed from singer to accompaniment, in an effect that could suggest the reciprocation of the love, or perhaps the way that the attention of the poet shifts from the external world to the internal world. The final chord is perhaps too obvious a conclusion, but overall, the song still has the charm one expects from the composer.

The text for the second poem, by Charles Baudelaire, is a cross between the thinking of Victorian moralists and the Aesthetic movement. Man must pay his ransom to God by the fruit of his labors, but the fields where these labors are produced are Art and Love, rather than the expected Duty and Faith (or some similar couple of virtues.) The idea of twos appears often in the text, art and love, roses and grain, fruits and flowers, shapes and colors, and Faure's setting, appropriately enough, varies between two moods, the first rather somber, with heavy, accented chords and an equally heavy vocal line. This opening, too, is almost abrupt, with just one quick piano chord before the vocal line begins, rather than the usual brief introduction from the piano. At the mention of Art and Love, and through the end of the song, the mood is exalted, the accompaniment mostly in the treble, rather than the bass, as it was in the first section, and full of rising arpeggios.

The third song of this opus is like the first, to a Prudhomme text, and again one drawing parallels between nature and human life and loves. Through the first and second verses, the music has a strongly transparent feel, starting with a series of light sixteenth notes from the piano, and the vocal line marked dolce, and over a relatively narrow range. In the third verse, the chords and the mood become heavier and more passionate, the vocal line rising to a passionate forte and leap of a sixth on "demeurent," and then subsiding into a diminuendo for the wistful repetitions of the wish that couples might remain together always. And in still another similarity to the first, the conclusion in the accompaniment is rather obvious.



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1.Au bord de l'eau ('S'asseoir tous deux au bord du flot')

By the mid-1870s, when Fauré was in his early thirties, the composer's mature style had begun to crystallize in such works as the Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 13 (1875 - 76) and the Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15 (1876 - 79). Au Bord de l'eau (1875), from the Three Songs, Op. 8, is an especially felicitous example. For the alternately long and short lines of Prudhomme's Parnassian poem ("To sit together at the edge of the stream which goes by, / To see it go by, / Together, if a cloud glides by in the air / To see it glide by...." ), Fauré conjured a bewitchingly insinuating, echoing vocal line which unfolds over constant piquant modulations and deft shifts between the minor and major modes that mirror the poem's doubt that love, amid transience, can last. The final major chord suggests that it can.

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