Classical Music | Tenor

Recorded on 02/02/2000, uploaded on 03/24/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Written at the close of Fauré’s early period in 1878, the song cycle Poème d’un jour (“Poems of a day”) is a setting of three texts by the Parisian poet Charles-Jean Grandmougin. Within these three songs, Fauré gives a pithy account of an ill-fated love, or perhaps more accurately, infatuation. The listener meets the hapless lover in the first song, Rencontre (“Encounter”), where he falls for a woman that he has only seen. In the next, Toujours (“Always”), he is pledging his eternal love in the midst of rejection. In the final song, Adieu, is witnessed the numbness of his resignation and departure. Despite the detachment of Grandmougin’s text and the indifference in which the lover recounts his so quickly faded passions, Fauré establishes the song in the key of E major, though without any trace of the consoling effect this key can so often convey. A sense that the emotions of the dejected lover have not wholly vanished is detectable in the vocal melody at the close of the first two stanzas and the poignant ascending fourth on the enunciation of “Adieu” at the song’s close. The rest of the melody seems to feign a sense of feeling in its rather methodical up and down motion. Underpinning the vocal melody is a simplistic piano accompaniment. It echoes the prevailing indifference of the text with a chordal accompaniment that passively follows the voice. Only during the second stanza, when the poet’s doomed affections are compared to the fleeting changes of the natural world, does the accompaniment liven any. However, it returns to sparse accompaniment of the opening, hardly unaltered, during the last stanza.      Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.