Ex. 1-7: Le papillon et la fleur

Fauré's very first song, published as Op. 1 in 1869. The text is from Victor Hugo's poetry collection Les Chants du Crépuscule (Songs of Twilight, 1835).

Fauré composed it as a teenager while boarding at the École Niedermeyer, a strict religious music school in Paris. The music critic Émile Vuillermoz — himself a former pupil of Fauré — wrote that the young Fauré would set aside his counterpoint and fugue exercises to write this song, calling it "a captive boy's attempt to escape toward light and fragrance."

The poem is a dialogue between a flower, rooted to the ground, and a butterfly free to fly away — a metaphor for love between one who is bound and one who is free.

Track 1 from the album Icon: Elly Ameling by Elly Ameling and Dalton Baldwin (1991)
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