Gabriel Fauré MP3, CDs & Vinyl, Music of Gabriel Fauré

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Gabriel Fauré MP3, CDs & Vinyl, Music of Gabriel Fauré




Gabriel Fauré: Overview


Gabriel Faure: Gabriel Faure (b. Pamiers, 12 May 1845; d. Paris, 4 Nov 1924).



Gabriel Faure was born at Pamiers in the Eastern Pyrenean department of Ariege and his father was a village schoolmaster, his mother the daughter of a retired army officer. Gabriel Faure's father had been appointed assistant inspector of elementary schools at Pamiers in 1839, but it seems clear that the addition of a sixth child to the family was not particularly welcome, and the small Gabriel was put out to nurse until he was four and never enjoyed much warmth or intimacy in his family as a child. At the age of nine his already marked musical talent was noticed and brought to the attention of Louis Niedermeyer, who had just founded in Paris an 'Ecole de musique religieuse et classique', where he agreed to educate the young Gabriel Faure free of charge. He remained at the Ecole Niedermeyer until 1865, and during that time formed a friendship with Camille Saint-Saens, only ten years his senior but employed as piano-master at the school. Saint-Saens introduced Gabriel Faure to the music of and and generally helped to fill in the gaps of a musical education consciously weighted towards the ecclesiastical and designed to prepare sound organists and choirmasters. In January 1866 Gabriel Faure got his first organist's post, at Rennes, returning to Paris in 1870 and joining a light infantry regiment for the months of the Franco-Prussian War. The years 1871-3 saw him well established as a Parisian organist, with his own church of Saint Honore d'Eylau and acting as assistant to both Widor at St Sulpice and Saint-Saens at the Madeleine; and supplementing his salary by joining the staff of the Ecole Niedermeyer, where - Messager was his pupil. At this time he was introduced to Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a famous and successful singer (and sister of 'La Malibran') and an influential figure in Parisian musical life. The young Gabriel Faure fell in love with her daughter Marianne who, in 1877, accepted his proposal of marriage but in a short time changed her mind; and it was not until 1883 that Gabriel Faure married Marie Fremiet, daughter of a successful sculptor of the day.



His first compositions (Vingt Melodies Op.1-8) were written when he first left school, fresh and charming drawing-room melodies with here and there the distinct note of a budding originality, which was to show itself unmistakably in the A major violin sonata of 1876. In the next year Gabriel Faure was appointed assistant organist and choirmaster at the Madeleine and he paid his first visit to Germany, being introduced by Saint-Saens to Liszt at Weimar. In 1878 he went only as far as Cologne, where he heard Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, but the next year he heard the whole of the Ring at Bayreuth. These Wagnerian experiences were reflected in the Ballade for piano and orchestra which he composed in 1881; but Gabriel Faure's musical personality never underwent the complete reorientation that Wagner's music caused in Chabrier, d'lndy and Lekeu. The chief effect was to enrich and enlarge his harmonic sense: he was not attracted by the sonority of Wagner's orchestra, by his musico-dramatic theories or his apocalyptic attitude to music generally. As always, Gabriel Faure was content to cultivate his own, characteristically French garden; and although he wrote a symphony (performed in 1885 but since lost) it was in the field of chamber music - in the widest sense - that he was to do all his finest work. Even the Requiem, composed in 1886 on the occasion of his father's death, is a work of chamber-music proportions, grave rather than tragic and quite untouched by the grandiose visions and dramatic contrasts of most 19th-century settings of that text.



Of the almost one hundred songs that he wrote during the course of his long life, published at first in sets of three or four and later in so-called 'cycles', some two dozen appeared during the 1880s, following the first twenty which had appeared in 1865 and have already been mentioned. The songs of the 1880s include such minor masterpieces as Nell, Les Berceaux, Les Roses a" Ispahan, Au cimetiere and two settings of Verlaine, Clair de lune and Spleen. The other poets from whom he had chosen his texts included Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle and Sully-Prudhomme but also a number of lesser figures among whom Armand Silvestre is important. In Verlaine Gabriel Faure encountered a poet with whom he seems to have felt a unique sympathy, although in personal character and way of living the two were poles apart. During the 1890s he set no fewer than fourteen of Verlaine's poems, and these settings show him at the very height of his powers. The first set {Cinq Melodies), published in 1890, was written in Venice, where the generosity of the future Princesse Edmond de Polignac (an American heiress belonging to the Singer family) enabled him to spend a holiday. These include Mandoline, En sourdine and Green and they were followed almost immediately by the nine poems collected together as La Bonne Chanson, all closely bearing on Verlaine's wooing of his future wife. Gabriel Faure's songs never show the acute literary sense, the instinctive reaction to individual words and phrases, that marks Debussy's song-writing. But he comes nearest to it in his Verlaine songs where the piano part ceases to be mere accompaniment to the voice and becomes an integral part of the conception, equal in importance to the voice and developing harmonies and figures which do not simply support but modify the character of the vocal line. Gabriel Faure's harmony in these songs is often advanced for the time at which they were written, progressions are elliptical and the sense of tonality is modified by the influence of the church modes, especially at cadences. This modal character is no doubt directly traceable to his musical education at the Ecole Niedermeyer, where the chief emphasis was on ecclesiastical music.



The piano was Gabriel Faure's other predominant interest as a composer. The instrument plays a naturally leading role in the two piano quartets (1879 and 1886) in C minor and G minor, but during the 1880s and 1890s Gabriel Faure continued to write solo works whose titles - Impromptu, Barcarolle and Nocturne - recall those of Chopin and reveal how strongly the composer felt himself to be a craftsman working within a tradition. In fact these works seem indebted to Schumann rather than to Chopin in their keyboard layout, but they have in common with Chopin a deceptive drawing-room character. Like Chopin, Gabriel Faure employed simple, familiar forms and an immediately attractive, though never commonplace, melodic idiom while, as it were, smuggling into the harmonic texture and the elliptical development of his melodies new and personal features. No one could possibly mistake a Nocturne or Impromptu of his for a work by Chopin or Schumann; and even the Theme et Variations (1897), which invites immediate comparison with 's Etudes Symphoniques, is entirely personal in character. This work forms, with Nocturne No.6 and Barcarolle No.5 the crowning point of the composer's maturity as a writer for the piano. After 1896, when Gabriel Faure became chief organist at the Madeleine and professor of composition at the Conservatoire, he naturally had less time for composition; and his time was still further reduced when he was appointed Director of the Conservatoire in 1905. Evidence of Gabriel Faure's qualities as a teacher ('less a teacher than a guide', as he was described) is provided by the quality of his pupils, who include , Koechlin, Schmitt, Roger-Ducasse and Nadia Boulanger. The reforms that he introduced as director were all concerned with broadening the musical basis of the curriculum in order to turn out all-round musicians rather than competent singers and instrumentalists and conventional composers of opera. He met considerable opposition but got his way, which involved Conservatoire pupils in the obligation to become acquainted not simply with the classics of their own field but with music of the remoter past and, more important still, of the present day. Gabriel Faure's sympathies with contemporary music were made quite clear when, in 1909, he accepted the presidency of the newly formed 'Societe musicale independante'.



If official and administrative duties interfered with the volume of Gabriel Faure's composition, another important factor determining its character was the deafness which, by 1910, had become a serious handicap. It is altogether natural that any composer in his sixties should reflect in his composition the new balance between senses and intelligence, the increasing domination of the spirit over the flesh, without which old age is an unmitigated disaster. In Gabriel Faure's case this balance was tipped further by that gradual isolation from the everyday world which deafness brings. And so his last songs and piano music - the piano quintet No.2, the piano trio, the violin sonata No.2, the two 'cello sonatas and the string quartet that he wrote in the last year of his life at the age of eighty- all this music has a certain quality of aloofness from the world expressed in economy of thought and bareness of outline, an increase of that 'quietism' which already marked his Requiem and a certain transparency of texture. It is as though Gabriel Faure were catching in his music something of the quality of that Mediterranean light in which he grew up and to which he returned increasingly in his old age when, after his retirement from the Conservatoire in 1920, he spent much of his time with friends who had a house at Annecy in Savoy. This Mediterranean quality, which some commentators have seen as Hellenic, is very strong in his single full-scale opera, Penelope (1913), a much more sympathetic subject than the Promethee for which he had been asked to write music in 1900. Gabriel Faure's music is totally untheatrical in character and its drama is essentially interior; the conflicts and struggles, aspirations and fears that find expression there are wholly transmuted into musical terms and demand no physical exteriorisation of gesture or movement, scenery or even orchestral variety. Penelope is essentially a musicians' opera and the singer who takes the title-role needs the intelligence and vocal qualities of a lieder-singer rather than an operatic diva. The four songcycles written between 1907 and 1922 - La Chanson d'Eve, Le Jardin clos, Mirages and L'Horizon chimerique - all require this same unostentatious, precise art, a voice capable of infinite nuance rather than grandiose effect and a penetrating, sympathetic intelligence. Gabriel Faure is perhaps the most characteristically French of all the 19th-century French composers, and to find a parallel to his art we should turn to the painting of Chardin or Fragonard and the prose of Francois de Sales or 'La Princesse de Cleves'. He died in Paris in 1924.



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Gabriel Fauré: MP3



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