Ex. 11-6: Rencontre

"Rencontre" (Meeting) is the first of the three songs of Poème d'un jour (Poem of a Day, Op. 21), Fauré's first song cycle. He wrote it in 1878, at the age of 33, and it was published in Paris in 1880. The three songs follow a love affair from its first meeting to its end, all within a single day.

The poems are by Charles Grandmougin, who also wrote the words of Chaminade's "La Fiancée du soldat." (Ex. 14-13: La Fiancée du soldat by Cécile Chaminade)

The piano plays flowing sixteenth-note arpeggios from the first bar to the last. The score asks for a soft, gentle start: Andante, dolce, pp and sempre legato, with the pedal changed on every beat.

Fauré wrote the cycle within a year of his broken engagement to Marianne Viardot. Only months before the engagement, on 30 May 1877, Marianne and her sister Claudie had sung the first performance of his Ave Maria at the Madeleine church in Paris. After the break-up, Saint-Saëns took him to Weimar in December 1877 to meet Liszt.

The cycle was first sung in January 1881 at the Société nationale de musique in Paris, by the tenor Mazalbert. Another song Fauré wrote in 1878, "Nell," is also in this app. (Ex. 12-6: Nell by Gabriel Fauré)

From the album Fauré: Mélodies by Barbara Hendricks and Michel Dalberto (1989)
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