Gabriel Fauré’s mélodies offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long career, Fauré composed all but a handful of his songs within six carefully integrated cycles. Fauré moved systematically through his poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the most important cultural issues of the period, Fauré reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The Fauré Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination and insight of Fauré’s musical readings. This book offers not only close readings of Fauré’s musical works but an interdisciplinary study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic currents of French poetry.

This fourth and final volume in the Fauré Complete Songs series brings together his last four cycles: La Chanson d'Ève; Le Jardin clos; Mirages; and L'Horizon chimérique. This represents the major part of Fauré's vocal output between 1906 and 1921. Published together for the first time, these late masterpieces form the bedrock of the twentieth-century French song cycle. This is the first published edition to make the four cycles available to higher voices. Also available: Complete Songs Vol. 1: 1861--1882 (high voice EP11391a; medium voice EP11391b) Complete Songs Vol. 2: 1884--1919 (high voice EP11392a; medium voice EP11392b) Complete Songs Vol. 3: The Complete Verlaine Settings (high voice EP11393a; medium voice EP11393b) 45 Vocalises for Voice and Piano (EP11385)

Providing an historical overview of the song cycle and a survey of the children's song cycle, this text includes structural, stylistic, and interpretative analysis of four representative children's song cycles and an original cycle.

Investigates how other types of music have influenced the scope of the song cycle, from operas and symphonies to popular song --

This reference book contains the complete literal translation and IPA transcription of Faure's Melodies, plus interpretation suggestions for each. Phonetic Alphabet for the language.