Gabriel Fauré (born 1845) started exactly on a par with the other French song writers of the seventies. His melody was tenuous and colorless; his harmony was thin and regular. Very gradually and very steadily he developed his colorful and unconventional harmony and a type of melody which, without being declamatory, was irregular and intimately fused with the accompaniment. Besides this cautious radical development, Fauré had a fairly generous fund of musical ideas and a sense of form and design superior to that of most of his contemporaries. It is doubtful if any one of his songs could be called first-class in absolute musical value. But his general standard was unusually high and steady. In nearly every case his songs are finished works of art. His faculty of self-criticism was keen and his attitude toward his art sincere. Though never a man of power, he possessed a lively intelligence which served to make him one of the most important figures in the French musical transition. He was not a pioneer in the more strenuous sense of the word. But he was truly a forerunner. His earliest songs show little that is distinctive beyond a sensitive feeling for design and proportion. The best of them are ‘May,’ ‘In the Ruins of an Abbey,’ and ‘Alone.’ In the ‘Tuscan Serenade’ we catch perhaps the first definite note of a change. It is a very slight indication, but it is truly a foreshadowing of the development which was destined to be shown in his songs and in all modern French music. The indication we are referring to is in the following phrase: [Illustration: Music score]