Before you vanish

A few days ago I was talking with some friends about how ill-timed some encores can be at a lieder recital. And while it is true that some encores can ruin the magic of a concert, it is also true that others become the cherry on top: pieces that round off the programme and that you remember for a long time, or that even create a new need in you.

That is the case with this article, which starts from an encore, the one offered by Julius Drake, the Gerhard Quartet and Katja Maderer to close their concert in Vilabertran last summer. The programme pieces had been performed by the quartet alone, by Katja Maderer and Julius Drake, and by the pianist and the quartet. For the encore, however, they all came together to perform La lune blanche by Gabriel Fauré.

Yes, it is exactly what you are thinking: La lune blanche for voice, piano and string quartet. It was the composer himself who arranged not only this song, but the entire cycle it belongs to, La bonne chanson, for tenor or soprano, piano and string quintet. On this occasion, however, it was a quartet (perhaps the double bass part was simply left out?).

At the time I did not know this version, and I made first a mental note to jot it down later on my notebook to write about it here.

I had already written about the cycle a few years ago (the article is linked here, if you want to go back to it), and when writing this post I went back to the notes I had taken then. I found that I had written down that Fauré had made the arrangement for piano and strings, which he had described as "détestable et inutile" ("detestable and pointless"). In other words, I had known it existed and had completely forgotten about. Though with such an off-putting comment from the composer himself, it is no surprise it slipped my mind.

Fortunately, the encore brought things back into focus, and I can tell you a little (just a little, because I have not found much information) about how Fauré came to make this arrangement of La bonne chanson.

In the 1890s the composer made several stays in the United Kingdom, largely thanks to his friendship with a man called Frank Schuster. Schuster came from a banking family, but discovered early on that he preferred spending money to making it. So he put his fortune at the service of the arts, and became a patron –and at times a personal support– to several artists, among them Edward Elgar and Fauré himself. Schuster kept a cultural salon that brought together, besides these composers, figures such as the composer Adela Maddison, her husband the lawyer and publisher Frederick Maddison, and the painter John Singer Sargent –who painted Fauré on several occasions.

In the spring of 1898 the composer spent a couple of months in London, and it was then that he premiered the arrangement of La bonne chanson at Schuster's home. We know that Fauré himself played the piano and that the singer was the tenor Maurice Bagès, but I have not been able to find out who made up the string quintet, nor whether the commission came from the host himself, nor why someone would have made such an unusual request to Fauré.

The day after the concert, in a letter to his wife, the composer wrote that he considered the arrangement "unnecessary", but had to admit that it had been very well received.

La bonne chanson has the rare quality of being a happy, joyful work; there is no drama to expect, no painful moments. That alone, which makes the cycle so unusual, is reason enough to listen to it. But it is also, simply, beautiful. We have heard La lune blanche and L'hiver a cessé before; today I would like to share the sixth song, Avant que tu t'en ailles [Before you vanish].

Verlaine's poem is an aubade –that is, roughly speaking, the morning counterpart of a serenade– and we can read it as two poems in one: one in which the poetic voice addresses the morning star and asks it to carry a message to his beloved before she wakes, and another in which a series of images shows the transition from night to day (quails singing, a lark in flight, dew, wheat golden in the sun), images that make the speaker anxious not to be late. The two poems are interwoven, so that each stanza contains two lines from the first and two from the second, until the final two lines bring both together.

Fauré's song can also be read as two interwoven songs. The first begins in the stillness of dawn and gradually intensifies as the light arrives; the second describes the images of daybreak. The baritone Pierre Bernac even recommended studying them separately, so that the rhythmic shifts of the second would not interfere with the rising line of the first. And it is true that, as listeners, the sudden change in the first stanza can catch us off guard, but we quickly grasp the structure and can follow this beautiful song.

Is the string quintet version unnecessary, as Fauré believed? If what he meant is that the cycle (and this song in particular) was already complete in the version for voice and piano, I agree. But I do not think arrangements are made to improve or complete a work; I understand they are made to present it differently, and I like how the strings add depth while also wrapping around a piece that is already, in itself, complex.

In any case, listen to Avant que tu t'en ailles performed by Nick Spence, Julius Drake, the Piatti Quartet and Tim Gibbs, and enjoy it. And instead of recommending, as I usually do, that you listen to the whole cycle, I would suggest you also listen to this mélodie in its original version for voice and piano, and let me know what you think. If you still have time and curiosity, there is a whole cycle, in two versions, waiting to be discovered.

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