Paul Verlaine in Parallel: Loeffler, Fauré, Debussy

The contrasts between song settings of Verlaine’s poetry by Fauré, Debussy, and Hahn have long attracted comparative essays from scholars and singers. The songs of the American composer Charles Martin Loeffler offer yet another Verlaine. His settings of ‘La lune blanche’ and ‘En sourdine’ are particularly puzzling when heard after Fauré’s songs on the same poems. This essay seeks to make sense of some of Loeffler’s most idiosyncratic settings and show them as competent and as sensitive in their way as the more famous settings of Fauré and Debussy. I argue that Loeffler draws on the habits of ironic theatricality he would have observed in the cabarets and cafés-chantants he enjoyed frequenting in Paris. He applies the effects of popular urban song to Verlaine’s lyric and in this way is able to move very independently from Fauré or Debussy even as he raises a popular form to a high artistic level. In this context, Fauré and Debussy appear more similar than different, but we may array the three composers in a metaphorical geography moving from the countryside to the heart of the city: Fauré the pastoral, Debussy the suburban, and Loeffler the urban.