When Gabriel Fauré was a boy, Berlioz had just written
La damnation de Faust and Henry David Thoreau was
writing Walden. By the time of his death, Stravinsky
had written The Rite of Spring and World War I had
ended in the devastation of Europe. In this dramatic
period in history, Fauré strove to bring together the
best of traditional and progressive music and, in the
process, created some of the most exquisite works in
the French repertoire. He was one of the most advanced
figures in French mu...(+)
When Gabriel Fauré was a boy, Berlioz had just written
La damnation de Faust and Henry David Thoreau was
writing Walden. By the time of his death, Stravinsky
had written The Rite of Spring and World War I had
ended in the devastation of Europe. In this dramatic
period in history, Fauré strove to bring together the
best of traditional and progressive music and, in the
process, created some of the most exquisite works in
the French repertoire. He was one of the most advanced
figures in French musical circles and influenced a
generation of composers world-wide.
Fauré was the youngest child of a school headmaster
and spent many hours playing the harmonium in the
chapel next to his father's school. Fauré's father
enrolled the 9-year-old as a boarder at the École
Niedermeyer in Paris, where he remained for 11 years,
learning church music, organ, piano, harmony,
counterpoint, and literature. In 1861, Saint-Saëns
joined the school and introduced Fauré and other
students to the works of more contemporary composers
such as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. Fauré's earliest
songs and piano pieces date from this period, just
before his graduation in 1865, which he achieved with
awards in almost every subject. For the next several
years, he took on various organist positions, served
for a time in the Imperial Guard, and taught. In 1871
he and his friends -- d'Indy, Lalo, Duparc, and
Chabrier -- formed the Société Nationale de Musique,
and soon after, Saint-Saëns introduced him to the
salon of Pauline Viardot and Parisian musical high
society.
"Au bord de l'eau" (By the waterside) Opus 8 No. 1:
This poem was discovered by the composer in a magazine
that was hot off the press: it appears in
Sully-Prudhomme’s 1875 collection entitled Les vaines
tendresses. Here is the quintessential Fauré for those
who are not drawn to the later songs of the composer.
This is music of sublime drift – the nonchalant
flowing of water, seemingly uneventful, but adding up
to the melancholy passing of time. Each seductively
inconsequential triplet gliding between voice and
finger seems to prolong a summer idyll at the same time
as effacing it. Fauré was already thirty when he wrote
this, and it is not the work of a teenager or
wunderkind. It takes a certain maturity to be aware of
water passing under the bridge, but it takes a master
to be able to comment on it with this degree of
philosophical calm and grace. The poet’s sentimental
contention that his love will uniquely survive the
passing of time seems gently but firmly refuted by the
flow of Fauré’s music which is tinged with just the
appropriate amount of an almost Schubertian melancholy.
Like many songs of the period the vocal line launches
itself with an upward leap followed by a spiralling
descent of ingratiating melody rich in harmonic
implications. Fauré then interleaves this principal
idea with two ascending themes that make the subsequent
falling phrases ever more evocative of watery ebb and
flow. It is a sign of the composer’s skill that the
song appears the most natural commentary on nature,
that all these musical means have been conjured with
seemingly the minimum of effort.
PARTITION