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
The Carnival of the Animals (better known in the English-speaking world as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"), the French nursery rhymes "Au clair de la lune", and "J'ai du bon tabac" (the piano plays the same melody upside down), the popular anthem "Partant pour la Syrie", as well as the aria "Una voce poco fa" from Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" can also be heard. The musical joke in this movement, according to Leonard Bernstein's narration on his recording of the work with the New York Philharmonic, is that the musical pieces quoted are the fossils of Saint-Saëns's time. Two pianos and cello: the lushly romantic