Le Plus doux chemin

In this song Fauré set words by the poet Paul Armand Silvestre.[1] It was composed in 1904 for the amateur singer Emilie Girette after her marriage to the pianist Édouard Risler.[2] Originally for voice and piano, it was later orchestrated by Fauré as part of his incidental music for Masques et bergamasques (1919). Fauré composed the song in the key of F minor, but it was first published (Hamelle, Paris, 1907) in E minor.[3]

When Fauré orchestrated the song for Masques et bergamasques he wrote to his wife that it was not at all well known: "for just as pianists play the same eight or ten of my pieces, so singers all sing the same songs".[4] The pianist Graham Johnson calls it an "enchantingly mournful serenade of a persistent, if unsuccessful lover … Fauré distilled to the essentials".[3] Both Johnson and Vladimir Jankélévitch find an autumnal quality in the song, despite the reference to "la saison nouvelle".[3] The Fauré expert Jean-Michel Nectoux rates it among the composer's most inspired songs, and groups it with "Le Ramier", Op. 87, No. 2 and "Chanson", Op. 94 as "a kind of homogeneous triptych … a cheerful but nostalgic farewell, the last sparks of the galant madrigal which Fauré had practised for so long".[2]

Analysing the song, Johnson describes it as a madrigal with an accompaniment evoking "the gentle plucking of a lute, although the strength of the bass line, almost a counter-melody in itself, depends on the legato tone of a piano to make its effect."[3]

• Johnson, Graham (2005). Notes to Gabriel Fauré: Dans un parfum de roses – Mélodies. London: Hyperion Records. OCLC 690608417.
• Jones, J. Barrie (1989). Gabriel Fauré – A Life in Letters. London: B T Batsford. ISBN 978-0-7134-5468-0.
• Nectoux, Jean-Michel (1991). Gabriel Fauré – A Musical Life. Roger Nichols (trans). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23524-2.