"A highly important reconsideration. Nobody before has properly addressed the intensity of Fauré's engagement with literature and poetry, particularly in terms of showing how it operates musically."--Roy Howat, author of The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier

"This book offers an excellent, at times brilliant, contribution to the understanding of Fauré as a singularly inventive composer of song cycles, and a sophisticated compositional 'reader' of poetry."--David J. Code, Reader in Music, University of Glasgow

Stephen Rumph is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works and Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics. He is also the coeditor of Fauré Studies, part of the Cambridge Composer Series.