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Wiktionary
clair de lune

a. Of a pale bluish-gray colour. n. A pale bluish-gray colour.

Wikipedia
Clair de lune
  1. redirect Clair de Lune
Clair De Lune (band)

Clair De Lune is a five-piece rock band from Minneapolis, Minnesota, currently on the Deep Elm label. The group is on hiatus now.

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 piano and voice, but he later orchestrated it for his incidental music Masques et bergamasques, Op. 112.

French

Clair de lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

English

Moonlight

Clair de Lune (poem)

Clair de Lune is a French poem written by Paul Verlaine in 1869. It is the inspiration for the third and most famous movement of Debussy's 1890 Suite bergamasque of the same name.

French

Poetic English translation

| Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

| Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life's largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming--
Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.

Usage examples of "clair de lune".

Then I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him -- the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Tenasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether.