2.Au cimetière

The sheer number and breadth of Gabriel Fauré's songs make generalizations difficult, but one aspect frequently noted is his tendency to forgo the narrative particulars of pictorialism. His music, with its slippery post-romantic harmonies and cursive melodies, seeks to resonate alongside his chosen texts with some essence underlying both. Such is the case with Au cimetière (In the Cemetery), composed and published as the second song in Fauré's Op. 51 in 1888 (and later included as the second song in the last of Fauré's three-volume song collection in 1908). Although clear affinities can be drawn between text and tone—the steady chords associated with the land, for example, that into arpeggios as the scene shifts to the sea—Fauré's haunting setting of Jean Richepin's text from "La Mer" seeks to evoke rather than depict; that is, he chooses his music for the same reasons the poet chooses his symbols, both of them striving to grasp something deeper. The first strophe of the song begins with stark, hushed E minor chords that cast a faint pall on the melody as it enters. Taking a cue from the somber music, the speaker describes a cemetery and speaks of death. The mood is one of repose, however, rather than anguish—the departed "sleeps a vermilion slumber beneath the brilliant sky"—and is soon conveyed as well by the repeated chords, which slowly rise heavenward with the contour of the melody and nearly attain a more optimistic major mode before settling back into minor at the verse's end. The second verse is more emotionally taut: loved ones are at the graveside, now, kneeling, "his bones, there beneath the flowers...bathed by their tears." Fauré's harmonies wander more erratically now, the bassline of the accompaniment dipping ever lower to begin its ponderous stepward ascents. The fluidity of the melodic line in the first two verses sets in relief the rigidity and irresolution of the melody of third, which begins with loud, strident chords and ardent repeated notes in the upper register of the voice, inflected only by semitone alternations. The scene in the text turns from melancholy to gruesome as the singer laments the fate of those not fortunate enough to be buried on land, the perished sailor who languishes in the depths of the sea "tossed, naked and forgotten, their eyes still big and unblinking."

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