When he composed his first melody in 1861, Gabriel Fauré was barely sixteen years old. He was still studying at the École Niedermeyer with Camille Saint-Saëns, who probably suggested that he set his favourite author, Victor Hugo, to music: the young budding composer's opus 1 would be Le Papillon et la Fleur . While the result was charming, we were still only at the threshold of Fauré's art: the music was light, regular, pretty, closer to the romance of the past century than to the great cycles that the composer would later publish. Because the Fauréan corpus had the particularity of punctuating Gabriel Fauré's long life until his death, or almost, with L'Horizon chimérique in 1921. No other musical genre – with the exception of his works for solo piano – would accompany the composer in this way.
Lydia (on a poem by Leconte de Lisle, 1870) already marks a shift towards a deeper, more interior expressiveness. The relationship with the piano also evolves: it is no longer an accompaniment on which the voice lays its line, it is a second actor who dialogues with the song and can support certain elements of the text with a discreet effect. Fauré also knows how to choose his authors, his texts and their subjects better. As he explained in 1911 in the magazine Musica , "Form matters a lot, but substance matters even more (...). The role of music is indeed that: to highlight the deep feeling that inhabits the soul of the poet and that sentences are powerless to render accurately."
Au bord de l'eau (Sully Prudhomme, 1875) is one of the composer's first "aquatic" works. It would soon be so popular that Henri Duparc would begin a letter with these words: "My dear bord de l'eau" ! Sully Prudhomme, Leconte de Lisle, Armand Silvestre were the poets that Fauré favored from this time onwards, which led him to cultivate a more intimate and painful aesthetic ( Les Berceaux , 1879).
In 1887, the encounter with the poetry of Paul Verlaine would not only lead to success: despite the efforts of the patron Winnaretta Singer, the two artists would not manage to create a lyrical work together. But from this date, Verlaine's poetry was at the origin of great Fauréan cycles, Les Mélodies "de Venise" (1891) and La Bonne Chanson (1892-1894). The latter is considered by some commentators to be the high point of Fauré's corpus, the composer giving a new breadth to the poetic discourse, supported by a harmonic language much more audacious than before - one can hear it in the long phrasing of La lune blanche luit dans les bois . Prison (1894) testifies to a clearly more lyrical style, rare for Fauré, and marks the last use by the composer of a poem by Verlaine.
Contemporary with Fauré's melodies, those of Reynaldo Hahn remained in their shadow for a long time, even though this emblematic composer of the Belle Époque was particularly productive in this repertoire (118 melodies!). Reynaldo Hahn had a sharp conception of this art, as he would note in his journal: "To underline a poem, word for word and without uniformity, to accentuate its meaning without distorting it, to shed light on such an idea, to blur another and to present the whole in a vocal and singing form, to produce a sharp, precise sensation, either by touching a fiber of the heart, or by evoking an image, all in a well-constructed piece written with taste, that is the goal and the reason for being of the melody for voice and piano ." Let's bet that this definition would not have displeased Fauré.
