Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924) was a French composer,
born into the minor aristocracy, he enrolled at age
nine in a Paris music school, where he studied with
Camille Saint-Saens and remained 11 years. He held the
prestigious organist positions at the churches of
Saint-Sulpice (187174) and the Madeleine (1896- 1905).
In 1896 he also became professor of composition at the
Paris Conservatory, where he taught students such as
Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger. He served as its
director 1905-20. In 190...(+)
Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924) was a French composer,
born into the minor aristocracy, he enrolled at age
nine in a Paris music school, where he studied with
Camille Saint-Saens and remained 11 years. He held the
prestigious organist positions at the churches of
Saint-Sulpice (187174) and the Madeleine (1896- 1905).
In 1896 he also became professor of composition at the
Paris Conservatory, where he taught students such as
Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger. He served as its
director 1905-20. In 1909 he accepted the presidency of
the Socit Musicale Indpendante, a group of dissident
young composers. His works include the operas Promthe
(1900), Pnlope (1913), and Masques et bergamasques
(1919), the orchestral suite Pellas et Mlisande (1898),
two piano quartets (1879, 1886), numerous piano
nocturnes and barcaroles, a famous Requiem (1900), and
many beautiful songs.
Gabriel Fauré has long been criticized for sullying
his otherwise esteemed body of art songs with settings
of poems by inferior authors. His settings of Verlaine,
for example, are among his most beloved. But other
poems, such as that used in Lydia, the second song for
voice and piano from Gabriel Fauré's Op. 2, are
regarded more coolly in academic circles. This, of
course, unfairly projects modern tastes onto fin de
siècle culture, and at any rate fails to address the
innovations and seminal stylistic characteristics that
this early song exhibits. The text, taken from Leconte
de Lisle, plays on the ageless European literary
conceit of using "death" or "dying" as a euphemism for
the erotic. The poet hardly casts the image as a
metaphor, describing a "death" imposed by the physical
beauty of the beloved. Fauré, on the other hand, paces
the dramatic curve of the song, with its hushed
repeated chords and chromatic chord progressions
growing more intense as the singer's melody arches ever
higher. The song, of course, reaches its zenith at the
moment of death: "Oh Lydia, return my life to me/That I
might die, die forever." Fauré's biographers and
others, recognizing the composer's penchant for
self-borrowing, have traced the vocal melody of Lydia,
with its stepwise ascents and descents and subsequent
scalar figure that together chart an underlying upward
incline, through nearly four decades of Fauré's
oeuvre: first in "La lune blanche" from La bonne
chanson (1893), then Act III of Prométhée (1900), and
finally, the Kyrie from Messe basse (1906). Scholar
Carlo Caballero, for example, traces Fauré's frequent
use of the sharped-fourth scale degree or
(appropriately enough) Lydian mode to this early song.
These borrowings beg no particular cross-readings or
intertextual connections, but, intentionally explicit
or not, rather point up the general stylistic
consistency one finds throughout Fauré's work,
beginning with these early songs.
Although this piece was originally written for voices,
I arranged it for Woodwind Quartet (Flute, Oboe,
Clarinet & Bassoon).
PARTITION