‘Automne’, from 1878, is among the most moving of these. The Ancient Greeks were alive, as their tragedies tell us, to the notion of ‘pathei mathos’, ‘learning through suffering’, and many of Fauré’s songs from the late 1870s on testify to the truth of this idea. If Fauré’s experiences in the Franco-Prussian War left him with a horror of violence in all its forms, the abandoned engagement with Marianne Viardot left scars of another sort, no less wounding. Fauré’s gently rocking 6/8 rhythms speak of constancy, but his harmonies, magical as they are, are not wholly restful-note especially the sudden unexpected note on the second syllable of ‘amour’, and perhaps the even more unexpected one on ‘tout’, which threaten to derail the flow. Even though the poet appears to be celebrating constancy, the litany of possible inconstancies-of water, clouds, smoke, perfume etc-seems to represent at least some sort of struggle against the status quo. ‘Ici-bas’, set by Fauré around 1873, can be read as either hopeful or dejected-are the dreams of constancy to be fulfilled or not? Fauré, having twice introduced the phrase ‘Je rêve’ with a gently surprising chord, sets the crucial ‘demeurent’ to a strong major one-but then he slips into the minor … We find a similarly ambiguous engagement with constancy in the same poet’s ‘Au bord de l’eau’, set by Fauré in August 1875. The Parnassian poet Sully Prudhomme excelled as an observer of human emotions, especially what have been called ‘tristesses intimes’. Nonetheless, this is a powerful and beautiful song, in which the ‘choc funèbre’ of the falling logs is wonderfully transformed into the six pounding left hand octaves (Cs in this recording) to become a ‘choc monotone’, the slow last verse in the major mode giving an early taste of Fauré’s lyrical genius. Fauré’s reduction of Hugo’s text to six stanzas does at least preserve a semblance of the message of the whole, but in Baudelaire’s ‘Chant d’automne’, one of the three settings he made of this poet in the years 18, his omission of the last two stanzas completely subverts the poet’s intentions: here, with his beloved’s help, the poet asks for the grace to enjoy autumn’s ‘gentle yellow sunshine’. While the slow nature music sounds somewhat churchy, his more agitated complaint that Nature is deaf and blind to human sorrow leans towards Gounod, and the exact repetition of previous bars in the piano coda lacks the imaginative variation found in later songs. In 1865, possibly while still employed as an organist in Rennes, he reduced the 38 stanzas of Hugo’s ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ to six, retaining the change of mood as the poet moves from a description of nature to speech. Not that the Hungarian or the German show up in these early Fauré songs. However, in that year Saint-Saëns joined the staff, bringing with him a a breath of modernist air nourished on such dangerous influences as Liszt and Wagner, and he and Fauré became lifelong friends. By 1861 he had been a pupil for seven years at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris which set out primarily to train church musicians. Therefore recording is an ideal medium for it, free of all the material distractions of dress, gesture or facial exercise.įauré’s preference for suggestion and nuance may seem to sit uneasily with his choice of Victor Hugo as the poet for his six earliest songs (one thinks of André Gide’s famous reply to question of who was France’s greatest poet: ‘Victor Hugo, hélas !’), but the composer, even at the age of sixteen, was careful over what he set. In this respect, if in no other, his music resembles that of Erik Satie: it tends to speaks to each of us singly in familiar tones. Where Duparc embraces the grand gesture, Fauré for the most part prefers the suggestion, the nuance. Henri Duparc was a close friend, but his songs, dubbed by Fauré’s pupil Ravel ‘imperfect but works of genius’, had only a passing impact on Fauré’s own. But many elements remained unchanged: among them, a distaste for pretentious pianism (‘Oh pianists, pianists, pianists, when will you consent to hold back your implacable virtuosity !!!!’ he wrote, to a pianist, in 1919) and a loving care for prosody-not infrequently he ‘improved’ on the poet for musical reasons. In sixty years of songwriting, between 18, Fauré’s craft understandably developed in richness and subtlety.
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