The "Sicilienne" is among Gabriel Fauré's most
familiar pieces; it began life as an orchestral sketch
in March 1893, intended as incidental music for a
revival of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Paul
Porel's Eden-Théâtre.
Left incomplete as that establishment went bankrupt,
Fauré rounded it off and arranged it for cello and
piano only in 1898, even as he passed the score along
to his pupil Charles Koechlin to orchestrate as an item
in the incidental music for a London product...(+)
The "Sicilienne" is among Gabriel Fauré's most
familiar pieces; it began life as an orchestral sketch
in March 1893, intended as incidental music for a
revival of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Paul
Porel's Eden-Théâtre.
Left incomplete as that establishment went bankrupt,
Fauré rounded it off and arranged it for cello and
piano only in 1898, even as he passed the score along
to his pupil Charles Koechlin to orchestrate as an item
in the incidental music for a London production of
Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, where it
introduces the scene at the beginning of Act Two, in
which Mélisande's wedding ring slips from her finger
and disappears into a well as she plays gently with
Pelléas -- a use for which it seems predestined.
In this form it was first heard with the play's opening
at the Prince of Wales' Theatre on June 21, 1898, with
Fauré conducting. Given its effectiveness, it was
inevitable that Fauré should have included it among
the four numbers of his Pelléas et Mélisande Suite,
heard for the first time on December 1, 1912, conducted
by André Messager.
The common practice of publishers in issuing multiple
arrangements of works likely to catch on -- for piano,
or piano and solo instrument -- ensured that the
Sicilienne's lilting wistfulness would become known
around the world in the version for cello and piano,
published in London by Metzler and Hamelle in Paris in
1898. Like a zephyr, the Sicilienne, with its
hypnotically fluid melody carried, as it were, on waves
of soothing arpeggiation, evokes a mood of mildly
delirious nostalgia. If all music, as Vladimir
Jankélévitch has remarked, is nostalgic in a certain
manner, the Sicilienne is nostalgic music par
excellence, for it embodies a truly existential, or
perhaps mysterious, yearning for some undefined,
imagined place, a Sicily in the luxuriant realm of
dreams.
PARTITION