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
Orchestral Suite No. 3 (Tchaikovsky) the two he had previously written. The problem lay with the opening movement. Titled "Contrastes", it was to be a fantasia of contrasting musical sounds and patterns, not unlike the "Jeu de sons" movement that opened the Second Orchestral Suite. The more he worked with the music, the more recalcitrant the music became and the more he hated it. "Contrastes" finally found its way into the Concert Fantasia. Tchaikovsky's original layout for the Third Suite was similar to that of his Second—a fairly large opening movement as in his first two orchestral suites, then three smaller ones and a theme–and–variations