Gabriel Fauré’s long career as a song composer, which stretched from 1861 to 1921, divides conveniently in half. Until 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed all but a handful within six carefully integrated cycles. (The lone outlier is Poème d’un jour, a short cycle composed in 1878.) Fauré’s turn to cyclic composition comes as little surprise as he had always tended to concentrate on individual poets. He confined himself to Victor Hugo in his early years, and then moved systematically through Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier before immersing himself in the poets of the Parnassian school. With singleminded focus, he would set ten poems by Armand Silvestre (1878–84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887–94), and eighteen by Charles van Lerberghe (1906–14).

Any consideration of Fauré as performer is inextricably bound up with how he edited and marked up his scores for performance. A central concern of this chapter is, therefore, how we may read through his notation, its quirks and its variants, to sense Fauré the performer. Most immediately, can doing so shed light on works that have long been neglected or regarded as problematic? The issue needs confronting if Fauré is not to remain peripheral in the repertoire except for a few works, mostly earlier ones. I, too, found many of Fauré’s later works initially impenetrable, until rehearsing and performing them made sense of each one – provided their narratives are coherently articulated and paced in performance. It often involved interaction with critical editing, through reciprocal processes of source discoveries, on the one hand, and practical experiment with extant readings on the other, particularly when these revealed ambiguities.