Rénée de Brimont, Gabriel Fauré et les Mirages

Fauré’s correspondence in his later years show him shows his increasing fastidiousness in choosing poetry to set with increasing fastidiousness, often searching with frustration for suitable material. In that context his decision in 1919 to base a song cycle on Renée de Brimont’s volume of Mirages has sometimes prompted surprise or puzzlement, usually in critical terms of the poetry being perceived as inferior, in particular, to that of his ensuing cycle, L’horizon chimérique. Nevertheless, the music Fauré composed for Mirages is easily argued as being on his very highest level. What drew him to Brimont’s poetry as a spur for some of his finest music and word-setting? In the first peace-time summer since the Armistice, the literary specialist and statesman Gabriel Hanotaux brought Brimont’s newly-published Mirages to Fauré’s attention. Scrutiny of the volume’s contents starts to answer queries about Fauré’s response to it, in terms of how Brimont’s own musical knowledge and literacy may be read through the volume’s organisation and titles. A lecture Brimont gave years later reveals some of the technical artifice that went into her poem ‘Danseuses’, and pays tribute to Fauré’s setting for ‘rescuing her poetic essay from oblivion’, solving challenges of declamation she had embedded in the poem’s rhythm. Analysis of that poem’s versification, and that of the other three that Fauré set, reveals the technical artifice and erudite reference that pervade Brimont’s Mirages; related scrutiny of Fauré’s music for the cycle suggests that he played and built compositionally on Brimont’s word play and her musical and literary allusions, which appear to involve his own music as well as that of Debussy and Ravel. This chapter, while written by the present author, draws widely on joint research by Roy Howat and Emily Kilpatrick, co-editors of the Peters critical edition of The Complete Songs of Gabriel Fauré.