At some level, it is something you always knew, but never quite put into words: Fauré's songs are nothing if not a tool of seduction. Figuratively, for us all – who has not fallen prey to their charm? But also literally, as Graham Johnson so convincingly demonstrates, as he rhymes us through the litany of young women who charmed Fauré and whose charms he sought to win with his songs.

Known as much for his discretion as for that charm, Fauré maintained a love life that was something of a public secret – equally known and un-discussed. Like the composer himself, Fauré's biographers have largely demurred from naming the names and telling the secrets. Enter Graham Johnson, for whom those names are an integral part of the story and an integral storyline in the composer's repertoire of over one hundred songs.

Fauré's career of song composition as an act of flirtation is nowhere more clearly put than in Johnson's discussion of L'Horizon chimérique, the composer's swan song and a reflection on the Great War. This oddly valedictory cycle is among the very small number of songs he wrote specifically for a male singer and shows a different compositional voice from his habitually feminine mélodies. Regretting that Fauré did not write more for the masculine voice, Johnson hypothesizes that Fauré's attraction to the female voice was a manifestation to his attraction to women. This is an implicit theme throughout Johnson's catalogue, but one that he articulates only briefly and fully near the end of the book:

However compellingly Johnson makes this point, the book is far more than a triangulation of the composer, his songs and the women who coaxed them from his pen. The book's actual subtitle, The Songs and the Poets, identifies the central focus of this richly contextual collection of information gathered together by a pianist/coach who has spent a lifetime with the Fauré repertoire. Filling a critical lacuna long felt in the Fauré literature, Johnson's book will be celebrated by singers, pianists and the legions of music lovers who have succumbed to the charm of Fauré's mélodies. A member of the faculty of the Guildhall School and a renowned accompanist, Johnson has produced the missing ‘companion’ to the Fauré song repertoire: a compendium of fascinating and well selected information on the contexts, poets, patrons and performers of Fauré's beloved repertoire for voice.

The appeal of the book notwithstanding, its publication in a series entitled ‘Research Studies’ is slightly misleading. By the author's own admission this is not a monograph grounded in original research. No new ground is broken here. Rather it has gathered information from the bounty of authoritative sources, including the writings of leading Fauré scholars from Vladimir Jankélévitch and Jean-Michel Nectoux to Carlo Caballero, plus a wide array of French social and literary historians and many of the wittiest and most observant diarists of Fauré's own day.Footnote 1 The intended readership for this book is as broad ranging as are the sources from which the information is drawn. While the first intended reader is clearly the student or performer approaching the Fauré song repertoire, Johnson has gone out of his way to make the book friendly to the interested music lover. There are, for example, no musical examples in the book, a decision that vastly extends its readership (and keeps its weight under 2 kilos). That decision also means that some potentially instructive points (e.g., a comparison of Fauré's early style to the late songs of Neidermeyer) are weakly made. It also means that some of the finer points of Johnson's insights are not as specific as they might be. As though in compensation, the book offers an extensive iconography of not only Fauré, but also his poets, his singers, and a generous serving of relevant lexicographical illustration – rare and beautifully designed volumes of poetry and first editions of Fauré's songs.

The strict chronological structure of the book, discussing each song in its presumed order of composition, cannot avoid becoming formulaic. Each of Chapters 2 through 14 carves out a chunk of years distinguished by some commonality and begins with a sketch of what was going on in Fauré's world at the time, serving up fascinating historical vignettes from social history, literature and the other arts. From this contextual sketch, the focus narrows to Fauré's own life, frequently with a notable attention to the women in his life at that time. The songs are then considered individually, beginning with a translation of the textFootnote 2, followed by a positioning of the individual song in the context just set, an encapsulated early performance history, a discussion of some of the interpretative challenges in the song in question, an identification of the dedicatee (inevitably another attractive female patroness or singer), and an extended discussion of the poet and the position of the poem in his or her work. Johnson concludes with a personal assessment of the song, especially in the case of those songs that he views to be under represented in the current repertoire.

The result (almost) transcends its status as an extensively annotated list by the sheer interest of the writing.Footnote 3 Often chatty in tone (and spiced with healthy servings of salon gossip), the predictable structure is redeemed by the liveliness of the information, particularly the adroit and faintly scandalous sketches of the poets – unfamiliar terrain for most singers and pianists.

The great value in Graham Johnson's Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets lies less in its usefulness as a compendium of all things song, than in those larger themes that thread their way through the lists. Three stand out: first, the focus identified by the subtitle, the poets themselves; second, the aforementioned women who so frequently inspired the settings of the poems; and finally, Johnson's intimate knowledge of the songs in performance: the wisdom of his fingers. Each of these topics merits brief consideration.

The subtitle does not misrepresent the case: it is the poets rather than the poetry that commands the author's attention. Graham does note Fauré's frequent excisions and edits to the poems themselves, but does not seem to dwell on what these changes are about; they are observed, but left unanalyzed. It is rather the poets, their politics and their biographies which offer fascinating context to Fauré's text choices: the amiable and versatile Théophile Gautier, the socially unacceptable Jean Richepin, the gothic Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the Sapphic baroness Renée de Brimont. In a few cases, the biographies of the poets and Fauré intersect, but mostly we are treated to the literary/political context of the poet's lives as a counterpoint to Fauré's text choice.

And what lives these were! In two chapters that focus on Paul Verlaine, Johnson provides fascinating (and almost salacious) insights into key figures in Fauré's life at the time: the patron – la Princess Edmond de Polignac (as she would become, the heiress Winaretta Singer as she had been), the poet himself – Paul Verlaine and the mistress/muse Emma Bardac (who would become the second Mme Claude Debussy). These stories, fascinating in and of themselves, provide revealing insights into Fauré's own complex personal and emotional life. Johnson offers a detailed background on the poems of La Bonne chanson, which Verlaine wrote during his courtship of Mathilde Mauté. Despite their ill-fated marriage and Verlaine's deluded entry into it (assuming it would cure him of his instability, his alcoholism and his homosexuality), the poems are seen as sincere in their effusion and mark for Verlaine a departure from the stylist writing of Fêtes galantes and other similar poem cycles. With hindsight, others have seen them as something else: Johnson cites Robert Orledge's characterization as a ‘wish-fulfillment fantasy’ (p. 225).

From the rich delineation of context, Johnson offers excellent discussions of the individual songs in La Bonne chanson, as in the case of ‘Avant que tu ne t'en ailles’, where he vividly explains the eccentric musical structure in a very insightful reading of the poem. Not for the only time, but in a very effective way, Johnson also draws an astute comparison to Hugo Wolf's song composition of the same era with specific reference here to the Italienisches Liederbuch (p. 235–6). Johnson deconstructs La Bonne chanson sensitively. Its complexity, its maturity, its daring, its unrivalled fidelity to the poetry, its ‘symphonic’ coherence, the unusual degree to which it reveals the composer and its near universal inaccessibility to the listener is the stuff of rich paradox:

Reading Johnson's book it is impossible to escape the fact that the influential women in Fauré's life are legion in number. A few – his erstwhile fiancée Marianne Viardot; his wife, the unfortunate Marie Fremiet, and his own Mélisande, Emma Bardac – are official stories in the Fauré biography, but Johnson introduces us to many more. The feminine influence is not restricted to the sequence of mistresses. Johnson, for example, establishes the twin and balancing influences of Marie Clerc and Pauline Viardot during the 1870s, a critical juncture in the composer's life. Clerc, with maternal concern about Fauré's lack of ambition, pushed the composer on to accomplishments. Viardot sought to draw him into the sphere of operatic and commercial success. The polarity of these interests and influences is well laid out, even if it doesn't quite materialize in the vocal repertoire. Viardot's commercial andoperatic bent is seen in some of the songs – especially the duets written for her daughters, and the turgid ‘Après un rêve’, but the one truly successful song of the period, ‘Au bord de l'eau’, is not seen to reflect the countervailing pressures of Mme Clerc to achieve in a more serious realm of composition.

Johnson's case for the critical role that women played in Fauré's song production is sealed when he makes the seemingly obvious, but infrequently remarked, observation that when the woman in the composer's life was a singer there was an outpouring of song. When not, he turned his compositional attention to other genres, as was the case during the turn of the century period of 1893–1904, a time during which his principal mistresses (Adela Maddison and Marguerite Hasselmans) were pianists and he wrote a great deal of music for piano (p. 272).

Within its broad function as a song companion, Graham Johnson's Gabriel Fauré makes its most original contribution through the insights that are transcribed from the pianist-author's knowledgeable fingers. The examples throughout the book are numerous. In discussing ‘Nell’, for example, he observes:

Elsewhere the master accompanist draws on his experience with other song repertoires to highlight the genius of Fauré's writing for piano: ‘The ingenious deployment of the fingers [in ‘Larmes’] provides an unusual texture where the piano sound is both snatched away and insistent, like a stifled sob. (Wilhelm Muller's ‘Wasserflut’ from Schubert's Winterreise uses similar imagery from tears that turn into a river.)’ (p. 174).

In his concluding two chapters, Johnson offers a peek into his studio, sharing well-practiced bon mots that have shaped generations of Fauré neophytes. For all the wit and arch pronouncements, the injunctions to singers and pianists sometimes come off as a bit school-marmish, when in fact the essential lesson here boils down to fidelity to the musical text/context: ‘When singing or playing Fauré's mélodies, artists have to suppress their desire to stamp a piece of music with their own personality; they must be prepared to deliver the music that comes from the composer and goes to the listener, almost without the intervention of the middle-man’ (p. 387).

The chapter is regrettably structured as a series of oppositions – somewhat manufactured in several cases, or not fully balanced and perhaps unnecessary. The subtlety of the mélodie, for example, can be communicated without necessitating a discourse on the bluntness of the lied. And yet Johnson repeatedly leans on slightly catty, straw-dog comparisons to score his points, as when he refers to ‘lieder-singing faculties aching to lay siege to the music of another, less co-operative, culture’ (p. 387). A constructed opposition between scholarship and performance gets aired through an overworked metaphor of the tactician (musicologists) versus the foot-soldier (performers). There are admittedly a small number of ‘tactician-musicologists’ whose theoretical approach to the material distances their discussions from the ‘soldier-performer’. But given the degree to which Johnson has relied on published scholarship, this is an ungrateful metaphor to be flogging (p. 379).

Advocacy as much as scholarship, Graham Johnson's companion to the Fauré song literature will be especially welcome for the rich contexts with which he surrounds this repertoire beloved by singers, students and amateurs, as well as for the insights offered by his knowledgeable fingers into the performance of this repertoire.