Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845-1924) was a composer, organist, pianist and teacher, and he is widely regarded as the foremost French composer of his generation. Although Fauré greatly admired Wagner he remained relatively free of Wagner’s highly-colored influence, and instead led his own harmonic revolution by treating chords with added 7ths and 9ths as consonant and by introducing modal inflections into an essentially diatonic framework; in the process he successfully bridged the styles of Saint-Saëns (his teacher) and Ravel (his student). Fauré’s compositions are distinguished by perfectly crafted melodies floating over rich and radiant backgrounds. Among his best-known works is the hauntingly beautiful choral Requiem, and his songs and chamber music have as a devoted and well-deserved following.

Fauré is widely regarded as the greatest master of the French art-song, and the heart-wrenching Après un rêve (“After a Dream”) is perhaps his greatest song. Au bord de l'eau (“On the Bank of the River,” 1875) demonstrates Fauré’s uncanny ability to marry music to words, as the flowing melody and accompaniment conjure the image of the flowing water, and the subtle shifts between major and minor echo doubts about the permanence of love while watching passing clouds and distant smoke dissolve and observing how a flower’s fragrance dissipates--but the belief in love is ultimately affirmed in the optimism of a major chord. Rencontre("Encounter") is the first of the three songs that comprise Fauré’s Poème d'un jour ("Poem of a Day"), Op. 21 (1880).

Composed in 1880 for cello and piano, Fauré's Élégie, Op. 24, was first performed publically in 1883 by cellist Jules Loëb (1852-1933), to whom the piece is dedicated. The piece remained so popular that Fauré was asked to create an orchestral version which was published in 1901, and first performed that same year with the legendary Pablo Casals (1876-1973) as soloist.

The cello and piano version of Fauré’s Sicilienne, Op.78, was completed by the composer in 1898, salvaged from the incidental music begun in 1893 for an unproduced play, and ironically it became one of its composers best-known works after being orchestrated and inserted into the incidental music for an 1898 production of a different play, Pelléas and Mélisande.

Fauré composed his Fantaisie, Op. 79, in 1898, for French flutist Paul Taffanel (1844-1908), Fauré's teaching colleague at the Paris Conservatory. Taffanel is credited with founding the "French School" of flute playing, with its emphasis on a lighter tone and incorporating vibrato, as opposed to a "strong and steady" tone that had characterized earlier playing. This far-reaching approach has had a tremendous effect on flute performance ever since, and was made possible in part by the development of the metal flute, which by now mostly has supplanted the older wooden instruments everywhere, except in Celtic music ensembles.