Ex. 8-11: L'aurore s'allume

An early song by Fauré, composed around 1870 to a poem by Victor Hugo from Les Chants du Crépuscule (Songs of Twilight, 1835). This song was never published during Fauré's lifetime and has no opus number — reportedly because Fauré himself was not satisfied with it.

Fauré set only the first three stanzas of Hugo's poem — the opening scene of daybreak. Fauré was in his mid-twenties when he wrote it. In the summer of 1870 he volunteered for the army and saw action in the Franco-Prussian War, including the Siege of Paris.

As a young man, Fauré set several poems from this Hugo collection, but left most of them unpublished; one of them, "L'aube naît" (Day Is Breaking), is now thought to be lost. "L'aurore s'allume" itself first reached print in 1954 — thirty years after Fauré's death — in a scholarly book on French song by Frits Noske.

From the album Icon: Elly Ameling by Elly Ameling and Dalton Baldwin (1991)
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