 | Fauré, Gabriel - "Lydia" for Woodwind Quartet Opus 4 No. 2 Wind Quartet: Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon |
Vidéo :
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| Composer : | Fauré, Gabriel (1845 - 1924) | ||||
| Instrumentation : | Wind Quartet: Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon | ||||
| Style : | Romantic | ||||
| Arranger : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL (1960 - ) | ||||
| Publisher : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL | ||||
| Date : | 1870 | ||||
| Copyright : | Public Domain | ||||
| Added by magataganm, 16 Nov 2012 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). Sheet central : | Chanson du pêcheur; Lydia (5 sheet music) | | |||
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