Byron Adams (University of California, Riverside)
“The Highest Type of Frenchman”: Fauré and England
“The Highest Type of Frenchman”: Fauré and England
Shortly after Gabriel Fauré died in 1924, Edward Elgar wrote about him to the music patron Leo Frank Schuster: “he was such a real gentleman – the highest type of Frenchman & I admired him greatly.” Elgar was an autodidact who possessed wider-ranging tastes than those of academic colleagues, such as Stanford, who had little use for French music. His freedom from preconceptions gave Elgar a unique appreciation of Fauré’s achievement. Elgar’s own music bears distinct traces of the French composer’s influence, as he repeatedly encountered Fauré’s music at Schuster’s soirées. Fauré reciprocated this admiration by helping to arrange the 1906 Parisian première of Elgar’s oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38. Elgar was hardly the only British composer whom Fauré influenced; traces of his musical idiom can be found in British composers from Ethel Smyth through Benjamin Britten, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, who took lessons for three months with Fauré’s pupil Maurice Ravel. This paper investigates how Fauré’s music moved through British concert life via Leo Frank Schuster and his milieu, which included writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, the pianist Léon Delafosse, and the painter John Singer Sargent. Most notably, connections made in Schuster’s salon led to Fauré composing incidental music for the successful London production of J. W. Mackail’s English translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. After his death, Fauré’s reputation in England continued to expand: Nadia Boulanger conducted the first British performance of his Requiem, Op. 48, during a 1936 broadcast transmitted over the BBC, and David Willcocks made an important recording of the same score in 1968 with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. This paper closes with a discussion of Fauré’s ongoing relevance to British composers such as Robin Holloway, Thomas Adès, and Ian Venables.
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Carlo Caballero (University of Colorado, Boulder)
The Smith’s Harmonic Forge: Voice-Leading in the First Movement of Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet
The Smith’s Harmonic Forge: Voice-Leading in the First Movement of Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet
Fauré’s musical language has resisted systematic description in its major dimensions—rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic. The styles of many of his contemporaries submit more easily to modern analytical protocols: Ravel, Skryabin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and even Stravinsky and Debussy, have been successfully parsed by various writers against a set of evident routines, including octatonic collections, ostinato cycles, and abstracted rhythmic and melodic patterns. Fauré offers the analyst an abundance of temptations that always seem to end in inconsistency. In the words of the poet Gerardo Diego, “his music has the impossible geometry of a curve with no formula for its continuation, made from a series of infinite tangents.”
Taylor Greer and Carlo Caballero, among others, have reflected on Fauré’s divagations, showing for instance how the interference between whole-tone, chromatic, and diatonic scales at once undermines and affirms tonal unity in pieces such as “Eau vivante” and the Fifth Impromptu. In this paper, I will take a different, neo-Riemannian approach. In studying the first movement of Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet, Op. 45 (1888), this approach yields more analytical consistency than hitherto obtained in most harmonic analyses of Fauré’s music. This movement is driven both formally and locally by an augmented triad B♭-D-F# that functions as an altered dominant in its two main keys, G minor and E♭ major, and occurs twenty-two times across the movement. Fauré’s choice of E♭ (rather than B♭) as the second key area for the movement seems calculated to a special property of this sonata form: when passages in the exposition are repeated in the recapitulation, the diatonic triads change position by a major third (the distance between E♭ and G), but the augmented triads remain the same. If, as Richard Cohn puts it in his analysis of a passage in the Requiem, Fauré uses the augmented triads as “switching stations,” we would say the stations have remained in the same place while the tonal routes around them change. On the final pages of the movement, Fauré works another augmented triad (G-B-E♭), a neighbor to the tonic, to its utmost, employing all twelve triads linked to its stepwise voice-leading potential on the right-hand side of the “cube dance” model (Douthett and Steinbach, 1998), while using one triad from the other side of the model (A major) as a substitute for the normal dominant. Fauré's exhaustive approach to harmonic possibilities is matched by a poetic analogue: he told his student Charles Kœchlin that the mechanical intensity of the movement captured his childhood sound-memory of a hydraulic ironworks in Montgauzy. This rare mimetic confession helps us to understand proportional rhythmic figures in the movement as well as its harmonic artifices. |
François de Médicis (Université de Montréal)
Fauré's Chamber Music and the Franckiste Cyclic School: Radiating from the Piano Quartet No. 2, Op. 45
Fauré's Chamber Music and the Franckiste Cyclic School: Radiating from the Piano Quartet No. 2, Op. 45
Gifted early with a highly individual musical manner, on the surface Fauré’s style seems to develop with superb independence. It seems immune to invasive influences, such as those of Wagner or Debussy, that were to plague so many of his contemporaries. Described as the apex of his cyclic writing (Nectoux 2008), Fauré’s Piano Quartet No 2 came about as the composer enjoyed close ties with the predominantly Franckiste inner circle of the Société Nationale de Musique (SNM). Indeed, between 1886 and 1890, Franck presided over the organizing committee which included Fauré (since 1872), d’Indy, and Chausson, with the intermittent involvement of other dedicated Franckistes such as Benoit and Bréville (Strasser 1998). Fauré’s quartet was premiered at the SNM in 1887, just as cyclic form started gaining momentum within the Franckiste movement, and as the society offered a privileged platform for the dissemination of numerous new cyclic works by Franck, d’Indy, Chausson, Ropartz, Magnard, and even Debussy.
In this paper, I explore how Fauré’s chamber music relates to the Franckiste instrumental tradition. I begin by pointing out ways in which the Quartet assimilates frequently deployed Franckiste procedures. A dramatic tone, unusual for Fauré, sets in from the outset in the work’s passionate opening, and throughout, a concern for formal rigour and motivic development is discernable. Here I point to recurring themes, integral to the well-known cyclic principle. More significantly, I address other characteristic but lesser known Franckiste techniques. In the first movement, for example, the transition is based on dialectical development of contrasting ideas (Médicis 2020); in the development, a new theme is first introduced unobtrusively, before gaining prominence and leading to a powerful apotheosis just as the recap is about to begin. Major articulations such as the onset of the recapitulation are carefully prepared with harmonic stasis, fragmentation and liquidation, while avoiding the all-too predictable standing on dominant. The Franckiste affiliation for these techniques are substantiated through cross-references to works by Franck and d’Indy. I conclude with a brief look at the posterity of these procedures in Fauré’s later chamber works. In sum, this study helps demonstrate how Fauré’s creative outlook, in spite of its apparent aloofness, went through phases of convergence with influential music trends from his time and was able to appropriate them. |
Heather de Savage (Central Connecticut State University)
Out of Paradise: The Fauré Requiem in American Film and Television
Out of Paradise: The Fauré Requiem in American Film and Television
The Fauré Requiem has enjoyed a diverse presence in the United States since its first American performances in the 1930s. Through years of concerts and recordings – the expected contexts for this music – it has unquestionably earned its position in the standard repertoire. By the 1990s, it was gaining broader social status as a staple of community sing events, and for benefit and memorial concerts. But the public ear often becomes familiar with classical music through mainstream contexts such as film or television, often without knowing composers or titles. Consider, for example, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, or Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Over the years, these pieces (and others) have become ingrained in the popular canon through serious and satirical contexts, and thus carry distinct narrative associations. I argue that the similar application of the Requiem suggests its potential to hold a comparable position in that canon. “In paradisum” and “Pie Jesu” particularly have underscored various dramatic situations, sometimes yielding a complete disjunction between the on-screen action and the well-established semiotics of consolation and humanity in this “lullaby of death,” a description even Fauré acknowledged.
This paper considers American film and television scores that have incorporated portions of the Requiem, with sharply contrasting results. The years 1995‒2010 offer a sample: from blockbuster films such as Lord of Illusions (1995), The Thin Red Line (1998), S1m0ne (2002), and Salt (2010), to an episode of the popular series South Park (2007), the alignment of this music to different expressive contexts not only lifts the scene it accompanies into a particular dramatic register, but also exploits the music's presumed “emotional currency” for affect. All four films utilize “In paradisum” in diegetic or non-diegetic contexts; S1m0ne also brings “Pie Jesu” into the fictional score of a film made within the movie itself. And South Park incorporates “Pie Jesu” in direct parody of the use of exquisite music to elevate poignant moments in big-screen action films. Such varied application of the Requiem underlines its flexibility and assumed effectiveness in evoking a particular emotional response from the audience, regardless of the broader on-screen narrative. |
Adam Filaber (Université McGill / Sorbonne Université)
Functional Mixture in Gabriel Fauré’s Harmonic Language:
A Case Study of the Major-Minor Seventh Chord in the Sanctus of the Requiem
Functional Mixture in Gabriel Fauré’s Harmonic Language:
A Case Study of the Major-Minor Seventh Chord in the Sanctus of the Requiem
Gabriel Fauré’s harmonic language is celebrated for its fluid chromaticism and melodically-driven modal character, emblematic of turn-of-the-century French music. These features, conducive to unorthodox chord progressions by eighteenth-century standards, pose a particular analytical challenge. The theory of harmonic vectors (Meeùs 2003) provides a tool for illuminating the unique syntactic qualities of chord progressions in this time period (Cathé 2003). However, due to its dependency on tertian harmony, it falls short of explaining certain chords found in Fauré’s music, such as the penultimate harmony in the “Fauré cadence.” Daniel Harrison’s renewed dualist harmonic theory offers a promising alternative, as exemplified by its application in Andrew Pau’s study of plagality in Fauré’s art songs (Harrison 1994, Pau 2016). By focusing on the voice-leading tendencies of individual scale degrees, Harrison’s theory allows for functional mixture, making it particularly suitable for the analysis of Fauré. I will tap into the explanatory power of Harrison’s theory to explore the relationship between voice-leading and functional mixture of the major-minor seventh chord in its different contexts in Fauré’s Sanctus, op. 48, III. This piece is suitable for two reasons. First, it features a considerable variety of instances of this four-note chord. Second, the melody manifestly serves as an anchor sustaining a sense of harmonic function amidst the ethereal harmonic fluctuations. I will classify the different occurrences using four interrelated parameters: pitch-class set (e.g. G B D F), morphology (sc. the chord’s geometrical disposition on the Tonnetz), harmonic function, and key. Each of the three morphologies of the major-minor seventh chord that I identify exhibits a varying degree of functional variation. Ambiguity plays an important role in instances where an interpretation that privileges voice-leading conflicts with one that emphasizes vertical sonorities. This case study highlights the multifarious harmonic identities of the major-minor seventh chord in Fauré’s Sanctus. Extending this approach to other chord types and compositions could shed significant light on Fauré’s “equivocal” (Johansen 1999) harmonic language.
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Taylor Greer (Pennsylvania State University)
The Exquisite Hours: Delius’s and Fauré’s Settings of Verlaine
The Exquisite Hours: Delius’s and Fauré’s Settings of Verlaine
During his lifetime Frederick Delius was a prolific song composer, crafting over fifty settings of poets from Norway, France, Germany, and England. Yet among this collection, his five settings of Paul Verlaine’s poetry are remarkable, for they offer a fascinating portrait of Delius’s emerging compositional style. Two of the five were conceived in 1895 while Delius lived in Paris, what has been described as his years of “apprenticeship”; the other three were completed much later between 1910 and 1919 just outside of Paris in Grez-sur-Loing. Yet his aesthetic principles in all five songs reveal a kaleidoscope of influences, including Richard Wagner and Edvard Grieg, both filtered through a French prism, grâce à Gabriel Fauré.
My paper consists of three parts: (1) a short biographical sketch of the Parisian cultural milieu in which Delius was immersed, including composers (Fauré, Ravel, Schmitt), painters (Gauguin, Munch), and writers (Strindberg); (2) a comparison of the compositional styles of Fauré and Delius that reveals a common affinity for harmonic color; and (3) commentaries of Delius’s two Parisian settings of Verlaine: “Il pleure dans mon coeur” and “Le Ciel est, par-dessus le toit,” both of which Fauré had previously set, using different titles (“Spleen” and “Prison”). |
Dane-Michael Harrison (Case Western Reserve University)
Prometheus Unspooled: From Bayreuth to Ciné by Way of Béziers
Prometheus Unspooled: From Bayreuth to Ciné by Way of Béziers
In the wake of a transnational wagnérisme, an efflorescence of outdoor arena operas, mounted in southern France at, for example, Orange’s Roman amphitheater and Béziers’s bullring, provided the Belle Époque’s answer to the gauntlet thrown down at Bayreuth (Christopher Moore). Through gargantuan music dramas that pushed the era’s enthusiasm for Greco-Roman pastiche to epic extremes, French composers as various as Saint–Saëns, Sévérac, and even, improbably, Fauré attempt a kind of meta-revival of Roman-circus theatrics. In these stage works, an appropriately Latin mythology is the Gallic composer’s answer to the old Teuton’s deployment of Nordic lore. Is it more than just coincidence that the cinema, in all its then-unrealized panoramic potentialities, has its nascent development in France during the same period?—or that sundry of the more ambitious silent films in the first decades of the 20th century would invoke a similarly Antique topos?
Fauré’s Prométhée, premiered at Béziers in 1900, is an especially audacious attempt at exploding the Wagnerian inheritance, in order to achieve a drama overwhelming in the scale of its performing forces and sheer physical compass. The Fauréan spectacle’s immediate success belied its impossibility as repertory work, or even as a template for other, subsequent works (Jean–Michel Nectoux). Having expanded the live music drama beyond its plausible limits, sonically and physically, there is nowhere else to go: substance must be exchanged for shadow, theatrical scrim for celluloid. As if in admission of his having already probed the outer limits of music drama, Fauré would retreat into a more conventional operatic frame for his subsequent treatment of Greek myth in Pénélope (1913); it was for burgeoning cinema to further the possibilities of Ancient epic in films such as Frederick A. Thomson’s The Sign of the Cross (1914), D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1915), and Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). In this paper, I examine Fauré’s tragédie lyrique alongside subsequent silent film epics, to consider how the specter of the fin-de-siècle post-Wagnerian music drama is gradually exiled to—and reimagined within—the abstraction of the silver screen. |
Roy Howat (Royal Academy of Music and Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow)
Ravel and Fauré: Musical Interactions
Ravel and Fauré: Musical Interactions
Linking Ravel’s and Fauré’s music is not easy, despite Ravel’s years in Fauré’s Conservatoire composition class: their music vividly reflects their different temperaments with different approaches to tonal structure, voice-leading and instrumentation. Ravel, later in life, stressed his indebtedness to his counterpoint teacher André Gedalge, reserving more general, albeit appreciative comment for Fauré. Nor was Ravel what might be seen as a “model” student in Fauré’s class: his creations often startled class and professor alike, over his two years as an active participant followed by three as an auditor. Nevertheless, copious documentation attests to Fauré’s unswerving support for Ravel, often behind the scenes, during and after those years. Ravel’s later writings reciprocally offer insights into what interested him in Fauré’s music.
Despite the contrasts, traceable musical links between Ravel and Fauré are strong enough to suggest not just a teacher-pupil influence but a musical imprint of each on the other, a reciprocity easily accounted for by the strong character of Ravel’s music. The two composers’ continuing professional relationship can be gleaned in part from Fauré’s appointment of Ravel as a Conservatoire examiner in 1906 (three years after Ravel had been dismissed as a student from the same Conservatoire!), and in Fauré’s ensuing presidency of the SMI, of which Ravel was a co-founder. Some of Fauré’s and Ravel’s most important premières also shared concert programmes between 1906 and 1915. Reciprocal compositional interactions can be adduced on various levels. Immediately audible are some apparent – and remarkable – musical citations of Fauré in Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and Ma mère l’Oye, and of Ravel in Fauré’s later piano works. On a deeper level is how both composers relate voice, text and piano, illustrated here from Fauré’s Clair de lune and Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, with reference to Ravel’s 1922 article “Les mélodies de Gabriel Fauré.” A final cross-reference links Fauré’s late song cycle Mirages (1919) to both Debussy and Ravel, partly through the poems’ author: herself a musician, Renée de Brimont can be read as having devised the eponymous poetry collection with subtle references to all three composers. |
Desirée Mayr (Bahia State University)
French Musical Influence in Brazil: Henrique Oswald, “the Brazilian Gabriel Fauré”
French Musical Influence in Brazil: Henrique Oswald, “the Brazilian Gabriel Fauré”
Prior to the Nationalist movement that arose in the 1910s, many Brazilian composers embraced European models and absolute music genres such as instrumental chamber music to inspire a modern and cosmopolitan Brazilian style. One such composer was Henrique Oswald (1852–1931) who had travelled extensively in Europe and was called the ‘Brazilian Gabriel Fauré’ by pianist Arthur Rubinstein. In 1902, Oswald won the first prize in an international composition contest promoted by Le Figaro, where Fauré was one of the judges, and he had his award-winning work, Il Niege, published by Durand et Fils. Other Brazilian Romantic composers, such as Leopoldo Miguéz (1850–1902) and Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920) were also influenced by Fauré. This reflected a society focused on French cultural values with a high demand for chamber music and the promotion of absolute music, especially in Rio de Janeiro, which had become known as the “city of pianos”. As in mid-century Paris, the presence of music in urban life had risen significantly in Brazil’s capital city, with the rapid proliferation of music clubs, theatres, and concert halls. I will show how the political moment in Brazil promoted the adoption of French musical aesthetics by Brazilian composers, illustrating Fauré’s stylistic influence on Oswald with examples from his compositions, where he uses an intimist, reserved approach to achieve a perfect balance between the music lines and melodic flexibility. I will provide illustrations from four of Oswald’s compositions:
(1) his Berceuse, op. 14/1 (ca. 1890), a transcription for violin and piano from an original piano solo, in the quality of inspiration and the sweetness of its melody reflecting the young French composer; (2) his Berceuse for cello and piano (ca. 1897), in the lullaby rhythm; (3) in the broken arpeggio piano accompaniment, and freshness and flexibility of his Trio op. 28 (1897); and (4) from his last compositional phase, his Trio, op. 45 (1945). I conclude by showing how the adoption of Fauré’s aesthetics in Brazilian classical music, set the ground for the subsequent Nationalist movement to emerge when Brazilian elements were added to the music. |
Andrew Pau (Oberlin College, Conservatory of Music)
Expanded Continuation Phrases in Fauré's Piano Music
Expanded Continuation Phrases in Fauré's Piano Music
This paper examines expanded phrase forms in Fauré’s piano music, focusing in particular on the expansion of continuation and cadential functions in sentence structures. Fauré’s piano works from the 1880s and 1890s often juxtapose regular eight-measure phrases with expanded versions of the same phrase. In the Second Barcarolle (1885), for instance, mm. 40–47 follow the model of a classical sentence, with a four-measure presentation followed by a four-measure continuation that combines continuation and cadential functions. When the phrase is repeated, however, the four-measure continuation (mm. 44–47) is expanded to thirteen measures (mm. 54–66) through the sequential repetition of two separate fragments. Similar examples of expanded continuation phrases can be found in the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Nocturnes, the Fourth and Fifth Barcarolles, and the Theme and Variations.
In addition to prolonging the temporal span of the phrase, Fauré’s expanded continuations often open up the registral space of the piano through the use of ascending chromatic sequences (mm. 56–59 in the Second Barcarolle) and chromatic linear passages in contrary motion (mm. 60–66). Building on recent work by Robert Gjerdingen and Gilad Rabinovitch, I will compare selected sequential and linear passages from Fauré’s expanded continuation phrases to conventional schemata such as the Monte prototype and the rule of the octave. Expanded continuation phrases can also be found in Fauré’s late piano works. In pieces such as the Fourth Impromptu and the Tenth Barcarolle, however, these phrases can be said to achieve a greatly expanded continuation function (fragmentation and sequential repetition) at the expense of a greatly diminished cadential function, to the point where the phrases can be described as “contracadential,” following David Huron’s description of Wagner’s music. Recent theoretical scholarship on Fauré’s music has focused mostly on harmony rather than form. In examining Fauré’s characteristic use of expanded continuation phrases in piano works from across his career, I aim to open up a new angle of inquiry into ways in which, in the words of Carlo Caballero, “Fauré’s tendency to homogeneity produces complex resemblances between his successive works.” |
Stephen Rumph (University of Washington)
Wagner and Fauré’s Requiem
Wagner and Fauré’s Requiem
In a letter of 1894, Fauré suggested programming his Messe de Requiem alongside Richard Wagner’s early cantata Das Liebesmahl der Apostel. The proposal comes as little surprise: Fauré was a passionate Wagnerian who conducted the Siegfried Idyll in 1887, just months before beginning the Requiem, and traveled to Bayreuth in 1888 for his second Ring cycle. Wagner’s influence appears most obviously in the Agnus Dei, whose chromatic Communion unmistakably recalls the Magic Sleep motive from Die Walküre. More intriguing is the recurring motive in the Requiem, a lyrical melody introduced in the Introït and recycled in the Sanctus and Offertoire. Fauré would use recurring motives far more extensively in his next major vocal works, the Verlaine cycles Cinq mélodies “de Venise” and La bonne chanson (1891–4) and would explicitly use “le système wagnérien” in Prométhée and Pénélope. In Fauré’s evolving vocal style, in short, the recurring motive of the Requiem is a feature and not a bug.
The lineage of this quasi-leitmotif, however, runs through Paul Verlaine and the Symbolists. Fauré completed his first Verlaine setting, “Clair de lune,” a month before beginning the Requiem. Like many of his Verlaine songs, it features diegetic music, a luxurious minuet in the piano that overshadows the singer’s parlando recitation. Fauré’s later Verlaine songs abound in diegetic music (mandolins, barcarolles, bird songs, horn calls, church bells), a tribute to Verlaine’s celebrated musicality and to the wider Symbolist fascination with music as a transcendent language. In the Requiem, too, the recurring motive embodies music: introduced on the text “Hymns befit you, God, in Zion,” it returns as angelic music in the Sanctus, rapturously accompanying the choir’s simple recitation. The hymn of Zion also welcomes the departed into paradise in the Offertoire on the words “Make them pass from death unto life.” Fauré’s use of diegetic music can illuminate a striking new technique within his Requiem: the independent role of the orchestra. The solo violin in the Sanctus, like the luxurious obbligato of the Agnus Dei and the soaring strings in the Intröit, commands greatest melodic interest, speaking above and beyond the choir’s simple declamation. As in his Verlaine songs, Fauré has made the accompaniment—indeed, music itself—a discourse that rivals the verbal text. In its motivic work and symphonic conception, the Requiem proves both Wagnerian and wagnériste, a fusion of Bayreuth techniques and Symbolist poetics. |
Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College, CUNY)
Fauré's Harmonic Schemata: An Analytical Case Study
Fauré's Harmonic Schemata: An Analytical Case Study
Gabriel Fauré’s harmony has attracted attention in music theory, ranging from Schenkerian applications (e.g., Greer 1991; Phillips 1993; Sobaskie 1999) to studies of surface harmony (e.g., Johansen 1999; Rings 2021). Robert O. Gjerdingen (2020, 2021) argues that the adoption of Neapolitan partimenti in Paris is meaningful for Fauré’s work, contrary to the received wisdom that the composer’s early training at the École Niedermeyer and Gustave Lefèvre’s (1889) treatise are key puzzle pieces (e.g., Chailley 1982). Most compellingly, Gjerdingen (2021) discusses Fauré’s teaching at the Paris Conservatory based on Parisian adaptations of the partimento tradition.
As Giorgio Sanguinetti (2012) observes, partimenti harmonize bass scale degrees with repeated sequential patterns (moti del basso or marches harmoniques in the French adaptation) or with unique sonorities for scale degrees, per the Rule of the Octave (règle de l’octave). This distinction was maintained in Paris. As I had explored elsewhere at length, one of Fauré’s characteristic tonal conceits involves conflating 5/3 and 6/3 sonorities above a specific scale degree in context where the other sonority is expected, creating conflicting impressions (Rabinovitch 2023; cf. Caron 2002; Cohn 2012). Such substitutions add a layer of complexity to sequences and Rule of the Octave segments. Without making direct claims about Fauré’s early training and building upon my prior work, I argue that the Theme and Variations, Op. 73 represent a compendium of harmonic models and their manipulations. This makes the set into a highly productive analytical case study of the composer’s surface-level harmonic usage. |
Mathieu Schneider (Université de Strasbourg)
Gabriel Fauré’s Reception After His Death in Charles Kœchlin's Writings and Works
Gabriel Fauré’s Reception After His Death in Charles Kœchlin's Writings and Works
Charles Kœchlin and Gabriel Fauré are two names in the history of music that seem to be looking in opposite directions:
On the one hand, Gabriel Fauré, the master, who is readily associated with a form of classicism and whom Charles Kœchlin himself presented as such in his monograph published in 1927 (see also Moore 2022); On the other, Charles Kœchlin, the impertinent pupil described as “the musician of the future” (Langevin 1979), but always loyal to the master, who, with Ravel, opposed the conservatism of D'Indy and the Société nationale de musique by founding the Société musicale indépendante, of which Fauré again was the president. This binary view of two composers (classical vs. modern) who lived side by side and appreciated each other is partly wrong, or at least needs to be qualified. In early 2023, Strasbourg's National and University Library acquired the Kœchlin collection bequeathed by musicologist Otfrid Nies. This is an exhaustive collection that includes, in original or copy form, everything written, published and composed by Charles Kœchlin. The collection contains many previously unpublished and inaccessible sources (sketches, unfinished works, typescripts), as well as copies of documents already dispersed in various libraries (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Médiathèque Gustave Mahler, etc.). This collection contains numerous letters and writings relating to Gabriel Fauré, which largely complement the correspondence (Li-Kœchlin 1983) as well as the few studies on Fauré and Kœchlin (Nectoux 1975, Nectoux 1979). Based on the new documents of this collection, this paper aims to present a study of Kœchlin's reception of Fauré after Fauré's death, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It will be based mainly on the analysis of: 1. The numerous writings (partly unpublished) of Koechlin, e.g. Kœchlin's image of Fauré's music in his 1927 monograph and the references to Fauré in “La mélodie” (Kœchlin 1925a), “Les tendances de la musique française contemporaine” (Kœchlin 1925b) and his Traité de l'harmonie (Kœchlin 1927). 2. The orchestration of La chanson de Mélisande in 1936, compared with that of Fauré’s stage music for Pelléas et Mélisande (see Orledge 1975). This paper will therefore make an original contribution to the reception of Fauré in the 1920s and his relationship with one of his pupils and fellow supporter. |
Ruka Shironishi (Mannes School of Music / Queens College, CUNY)
The Gregorian Sanctus of the Requiem Mass and Fauré’s Major-Mediant Cadences
The Gregorian Sanctus of the Requiem Mass and Fauré’s Major-Mediant Cadences
A cadence that harmonizes an ascending whole-step motion in an upper voice may be identified as being characteristically “modal,” when the goal tone of the melodic motion is supported by an octave in the bass. Within Fauré’s works, we find numerous instances of such modal cadences that present intriguing uses of chromaticism—one of which is a cadential progression that leads to the major-mediant triad within a major key. An example of this type of cadence, which I refer to as a major-mediant cadence, is found in the opening phrase of Fauré’s “Sanctus” from Messe basse, and the chromaticism used in such a cadence arguably has its origin in a practice of plainchant harmonization from nineteenth-century France.
In François Gevaert’s setting of the chant melody “Sanctus” from the Requiem Mass, we find a harmonic cadence that is comparable to the major-mediant cadence of Fauré’s own “Sanctus.” Gevaert begins the harmonization in F major but cadences on an A major chord at the end of the first phrase, on the word “Sábaoth.” It is a contrapuntal cadence with a 6–8 motion in the outer voices that can serve as a model not only for the contrapuntal form but also for the plagal form of Fauré’s major-mediant cadences. The plagal form of a major-mediant cadence consists of a progression that leads to a major triad from a second-inversion major-minor seventh chord, which is a progression that is often referred to as a Fauréan cadence. The presentation will first investigate the motivation for the use of chromaticism in Gevaert’s setting of the “Sanctus” melody through a discussion of his method of plainchant accompaniment. Viewing Gevaert’s harmonization as a possible model, we will then examine Fauré’s treatment of major-mediant cadences in various pieces and how it may be traced back to a practice of plainchant accompaniment. |
Efrat Urbach (Bar-Ilan University)
Alpha to Omega: From Gabriel Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” to the Messe basse Sanctus
Alpha to Omega: From Gabriel Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” to the Messe basse Sanctus
Fauré’s liturgical works are mostly small, unassuming pieces for solo or duo voice and organ. Orledge finds them “rather nondescript”; Caballero claims they “greatly resemble one another in style” and “generally avoid strongly demonstrative emotions.” The bulk of them were composed over a period of seven years (1887-1894), the peak of Fauré’s output during his eighteen years as choir director and deputy organist at La Madeleine, before he stepped into the vacancies left by Dubois in both the composition class at the conservatoire and the chief organist’s pew at La Madeleine (1896). Prior to this period, however, two of his most interesting sacred works were written: the Cantique de Jean Racine (1864) and the Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (1881), which was later revised and enlarged as Messe basse (1907).
In this paper I explore an interesting link among these three works, each representing a different stage in Fauré’s sacred output: the Cantique de Jean Racine (1864) was written while he was still at the École Niedermeyer; the Sanctus of the Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (1881) was a cooperative production with Messager early in Fauré’s La Madeleine tenure; and the Sanctus elaborated from it in the Messe Basse (1907), Fauré’s last church composition, was rewritten and published after his resignation from the church. The three works share a cadence, no more; Fauré transplanted a musical idea from Racine’s Verbe égal au Très-Haut to the text of the Sanctus. The idea was then further carried into the final version of the Messe Basse Sanctus, so that it exists on three levels of abstraction, from Fauré’s compositional “alpha” through his “omega.” By tracing its evolution we can outline Fauré’s sacred works and examine his interpretation of the concepts of prayer and sanctity. |
Collin Ziegler (University of California, Berkeley)
Hearing Symbolism: Fauré's Bonne Chanson
Hearing Symbolism: Fauré's Bonne Chanson
When Gabriel Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson premiered in 1894, critics hated it: Camille Saint-Saëns lamented that Fauré had gone “completely mad,” and Camille Bellaigue condemned the work’s “decomposition” and “corruption.” However, as Carlo Caballero has shown, praise for the piece came from a surprising corner: Marcel Proust lauded the cycle’s bold textures and rhythmic innovations and expressed surprise that composers were “unanimous in disliking” it. This paper will argue for a new hearing of La Bonne Chanson as shaped by the upper-class salon culture that Proust so cuttingly describes and by the Symbolist figures who frequented it.
Multiple features of the cycle come into focus when understood as manifestations of the Symbolist cultivation of spontaneity, presence, and psychological depth—a matrix of ideas and aesthetic qualities that persistently circulated among Fauré’s circle. In La Bonne Chanson, Fauré selected and reordered poems from Paul Verlaine’s collection of the same name, transforming Verlaine’s raw paean to domestic bliss into a rich psychological narrative. As Stephen Rumph has shown, Fauré also created a unique motivic structure, in which the leitmotivs adopt and then gradually shed verbal associations as voice gives way to instrumental play, rendering the text arbitrary and in keeping with the Symbolist ideal of “musique pure.” Musicologists have often mischaracterized Symbolism as a movement that pushes language to the breaking point and prioritizes atmosphere over psychological precision. This paper argues that the Symbolists in Fauré’s circle were not part of this mystifying project but were instead committed to the discovery of psychological truths through new uses of language. To hear La Bonne Chanson through Proust’s ears reveals the fault-lines in Fauré’s reception history, pitting music critics against an emerging and contested aesthetic movement, and allows us to understand Symbolist thought in a new way. |