This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

It is no surprise that Fauré has never been associated with orientalism or exotic musics. Aside from a few paragraphs by Sylvain Caron, no one has ventured to write a study of Fauré and orientalism.1 Indeed, it almost seems as if the composer himself ordained this dissociation for his own legacy. His final two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113, and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, bring the point home. The titles of both works evoke faraway geographies. But the first song of Mirages, “Cygne sur l’eau,” works in the opposite direction: the itinerary reaches inward.

The tragedian Aeschylus is said to have called his plays slices from Homer’s banquet, by which he presumably meant slices from what Homer had left behind on the table.1 It is much easier, as Aeschylus knew (and so famously did), to develop stories that Homer probably knew but did not tell or (as Roman poets eventually did) to weave new stories using Homeric techniques than it is to rework in an artistically effective way what Homer had already done in the Iliad and Odyssey. A change of genre may certainly make that task easier, and the aim of this essay is to look specifically at what happens when a slice from Homer’s own platter becomes a libretto and then, in turn, a performable opera. The specific process in question involves the self-styled poème lyrique of the prolific dramatist, librettist, and actor René Fauchois and Pénélope, the opera made from it by Gabriel Fauré.

Understanding the training of professional musicians in nineteenth-century France may require some conceptual adjustments. Words that seem to mean one thing for us today can actually have meant something rather different then. Accompagnement, for instance, meant practical keyboard harmony and thoroughbass, harmonie meant practical counterpoint, and contrepoint meant imitative counterpoint in the form of fugues and canons. As we shall see below, when Gabriel Fauré wrote a harmony exercise in which he provided the bass and a student was to add the implied tenor, alto, and soprano voices, he intended it to be completed as an informal type of fugue, the locus classicus of counterpoint. “Counterpoint” was a word deeply rooted in the practices of trained medieval monks who could improvise a series of points (= notes) against (Lat. contra) the notes of a Gregorian chant.

In her “Étude comparée des langages harmoniques de Fauré et de Debussy,” Françoise Gervais contends that “melody does not have an independent existence in Fauré’s music. It is born of the harmony and remains inseparable from it.”1 Moreover, not a single chapter of this book, which has stood now for more than forty years as a musicological summa on Fauréan harmony, is dedicated to melody.

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).

Let us begin by considering how Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) made a way for himself in France between about 1855 and 1909. As for the posthumous international development of research into his music, that will be the focus of the latter part of this text.

Scholars of French music have long known the name Vladimir Jankélévitch, but it is only in recent years that he has captured the attention of musicologists more generally. This is due almost entirely to the efforts of Carolyn Abbate, whose much-debated 2004 essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?” gives Jankélévitch pride of place.1 A year before that essay, Abbate had published a translation of Jankélévitch’s 1961 book Music and the Ineffable, which was the focus of a special session at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and a subsequent colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Upon learning of Gabriel Fauré’s death, his patron Leo Frank Schuster (1852–1927) raced across the Channel to attend the grandiose state funeral in Paris. The reason for this hectic journey was twofold: Schuster sought to mourn a departed friend, but he also hoped to hear Fauré’s Messe de Requiem, Op. 48, which was being sung for the occasion. As the Requiem had not yet been performed in Great Britain – it would not be heard there until 1936 – Schuster did not want to miss this opportunity.

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.