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 In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

Upon Fauré's return to Paris after the upheavals of the Commune he heard Duparc’s new masterpiece L’invitation au voyage. That work is a turning point in French song; it also introduced Fauré to Baudelaire’s work and encouraged him to consider moving away from composing romances to the long poems of Hugo. Instead he began to tackle shorter poems by younger poets that had the power to create a more intense musical atmosphere. Leconte de Lisle’s Lydia (No XVII of the ‘Études latines’ section of his Poèmes antiques of 1852) was an ideal match with the composer’s new espousal of the mélodie. The simplicity of the music on the page belies a stunning new sophistication in Fauré’s approach. The vocal line is shadowed by the voice adding to the Attic purity of the evocation; the attenuated piano-writing avoids anything unseemly or immodest. An ancient Greek atmosphere is created partly by use of the Lydian mode, the sharpened fourth of the scale. This gentle exoticism adds to the music’s rarefied charm; it is as if we are breathing the air of Parnassus (the marvellous postlude dissolves into those ethereal regions more convincingly than the ascension depicted in Schubert’s Ganymed). At ‘tes baisers de colombe’ the undulating vocal line, accompanied by gently fluting thirds, is the most convincing illustration of cooing doves in all song. Dove imagery is welcomed; Leconte de Lisle’s description of Lydia’s neck being as ‘fresh and pale as milk’ is another matter! Confronted with the poet’s ‘Et sur ton col frais, et plus blanc / Que le lait’ Fauré, with devilish cunning, changes ‘plus’ to ‘si’ and simply leaves out ‘Que le lait’, allowing ‘blanc’ to link with the next verb ‘roule’. A piano interlude (bars 6 to 7) stands in for the judicious cut. If this song owes its existence to Duparc, that composer’s Phydilé was certainly inspired by Lydia, as was Chausson’s Hébé (all three song heroines were Leconte de Lisle’s Grecian nymphs).

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 "Lydia" from "2 Songs" (Op. 4 No. 2) for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) and Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).