La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61

If you think Fauré is all gentle restraint, this roughly 25-minute cycle of nine songs will catch you completely off guard: it blazes with an almost reckless joy. Fauré set nine poems from Paul Verlaine's collection of the same name during 1892 to 1894, tracing a narrative of awakening love through imagery of dawn, moonlit forests, and turning seasons. What makes it structurally thrilling is that Fauré quietly plants five recurring melodic ideas across all nine songs, so that by the final song they converge together at once, like threads suddenly pulled taut, and the effect is startlingly euphoric. When it first appeared in public, the complexity so unsettled audiences that Camille Saint-Saëns reportedly declared that Fauré had gone mad.

What to listen for

In the sixth song, 'Avant que tu ne t'en ailles' (Before you go away), the music lifts into a bright, dancing figure at the word for quails singing at daybreak, and it feels like the whole texture suddenly opens to the sky. Then, in the final song, listen for the moment when all those quietly planted themes from earlier in the cycle surface together: the cumulative rush of recognition is one of the most quietly electrifying moments in French song.

Recommended recording

Anne Sofie von Otter with Bengt Forsberg has been frequently cited for its luminous tone and clear-eyed shaping of Fauré's chromatic textures across the full arc of the cycle.

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