fileuse

Name of a type of instrumental piece with rapid figurations of various kinds suggesting the motion of a spinning-wheel and often, in its melody, a spinning-song. There are familiar examples by Joseph Raff and Gabreil Fauré (in the latter's incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande), and Felix Mendelssohn's Song without Words, Op. 67 No. 4, although not so entitled, conforms to the type, being in fact nicknamed Spinnerlied in German, though called The Bee's Wedding in English. The prototype of the fileuse was vocal, for example the spinning-choruses in Haydn's Seasons (Winter) and Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, and Franz Schubert's song Gretchen am Spinnrade.