Clair de lune (Fauré) Clair de lune (Fauré) "Clair de lune", ("Moonlight") Op. 46 No 2, is a song by Gabriel Fauré, composed in 1887 to words by Paul Verlaine. The pianist Graham Johnson writes that it closes Fauré's second period and opens the doors into his third. Johnson notes that it is "for many people the quintessential French mélodie". The lyric is from Verlaine's early collection "Fêtes galantes" (1869). It inspired not only Fauré but Claude Debussy, who set it in 1881 and wrote a well known piano piece inspired by it in 1891. Fauré's 1887 setting is for voice and piano; in
Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) aside, Satie was painstaking in his efforts to redevelop these old musical forms in modern terms, harmonically and structurally. He rejected the first movement he completed, an untitled 31-bar chorale in G Major, and experimented with several fugue subjects (including a quotation of the folksong "Au clair de la lune") for the "Fugue à tâtons". In his analysis of Satie's composing methods Robert Orledge remarked on "how ordinary his first thoughts often were", and this certainly applies to the "Choses vues". Satie's original order for the pieces - "Fantaisie", "Choral", "Fugue" - would have given the suite a conventional fast-slow-fast