Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845 – 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.

Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a young boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the École Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition. By his last years, he was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic. Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.

Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

The poem "Fleur Jetee" follows Notre amour in Silvestre’s collection entitled Les ailes d’or. It inspires a powerful song that is often compared to Schubert’s Erlkönig because of the challenging octave repetitions of the piano-writing. There is a romantic grandiloquence about this music, one might even call it melodramatic, which is not native to the composer. Because Fauré so seldom allows himself to become passionate in this manner, Fleur jetée is a useful foil for the more introverted mélodies when performers plan a group of contrasting Fauré songs. It is rare to find an instance where Fauré’s teacher Camille Saint-Saëns has actually exerted an influence on his pupil, but the piano-writing here, requiring both exact adherence to the tempo and clarity in its repetitive articulation, reminds us of the robust demands of certain passages in the Saint-Saëns piano concertos (speed up the accompaniment to Dalila’s aria, Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix, and you will find similarities with the stave-hopping piano-writing of the whole central portion of Fleur jetée). The voice too, as in some of Saint-Saëns’ songs, is unafraid to flirt with an operatic scale and manner that easily becomes ‘ham’ in the hands of less refined singers. There are, nevertheless, details a-plenty to admire; the seamless harmonic progress of the music sweeps us along and blows us away, ‘au gré du vent’, in one great courbe. As in Notre amour, the pulsating right-hand accompaniment is interlaced with ascending and descending scale passages in the left hand. Towards the end the time signature changes for three bars from 6/8 to 9/8 – an indication of how well Fauré understood the voice, and the expanded space that it needs to manoeuvre at the top of the stave. A polished performance of Fleur jetée can be thrilling, but too often the public remembers only the final high notes, and the thundering postlude where the pianist always risks landing on a split chord at the last hurdle.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Faur%C3%A9)

Although originally composed for Voice (Soprano) and Piano, I created this Interpretation of the "Fleur Jetée" from "4 Songs" (Op. 39 No. 2) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) and Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).