Toil,  Toile and Étoile: Compositional Impasse and Self-Borrowing in Gabriel Fauré’s Trois Préludes, Op. 103

The first three of Fauré’s nine preludes (Op. 103), first published as Trois Préludes , were completed and dispatched ten days late. This article suggests that the deadline created a compositional strain by uncovering a range of phenomena, from copying errors to shared gestures and the mining of older works. Piecing together the web of self-quotation and associations found in primary and secondary sources of Fauré scholarship, it appears that Fauré’s first three preludes display not only a nocturnal arc, but also a vague relation to the three main heroines of his oeuvre, so that depictions of stars, spinning and flames intermingle. Additionally, Fauré’s compositional short-cuts, including self-borrowing and additive thematic development, are utilized over a pervasive earworm which slipped into the composer’s working memory through a score recently completed, the last song of La chanson d’Ève (op. 95): ‘Ô mort, poussière d’étoiles’. The combined discussion frames a self-referential story of the composer’s toil with his current deadline; although past deadlines – toiles and étoiles – resurface, Fauré emerges victorious with a completed score in hand.