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| Composer : | Fauré, Gabriel (1845 - 1924) | ||
| Instrumentation : | Flute and Piano | ||
| Style : | Romantic | ||
| Arranger : Publisher : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL (1960 - ) | ||
| Copyright : | Public Domain | ||
| Added by magataganm, 14 Dec 2022 When Gabriel Fauré was a boy, Berlioz had just written La damnation de Faust and Henry David Thoreau was writing Walden. By the time of his death, Stravinsky had written The Rite of Spring and World War I had ended in the devastation of Europe. In this dramatic period in history, Fauré strove to bring together the best of traditional and progressive music and, in the process, created some of the most exquisite works in the French repertoire. He was one of the most advanced figures in French musical circles and influenced a generation of composers world-wide. Fauré was the youngest child of a school headmaster and spent many hours playing the harmonium in the chapel next to his father's school. Fauré's father enrolled the 9-year-old as a boarder at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, where he remained for 11 years, learning church music, organ, piano, harmony, counterpoint, and literature. In 1861, Saint-Saëns joined the school and introduced Fauré and other students to the works of more contemporary composers such as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. Fauré's earliest songs and piano pieces date from this period, just before his graduation in 1865, which he achieved with awards in almost every subject. For the next several years, he took on various organist positions, served for a time in the Imperial Guard, and taught. In 1871 he and his friends -- d'Indy, Lalo, Duparc, and Chabrier -- formed the Société Nationale de Musique, and soon after, Saint-Saëns introduced him to the salon of Pauline Viardot and Parisian musical high society. "Prison" Opus 83 No. 1: In the summer of 1873 the tension between those run-away lovers Rimbaud and Verlaine reached breaking point. The pair had travelled backwards and forwards between London and Brussels, and the arrival of that éminence grise, Verlaine’s mother, complicated matters further. On 10 July Verlaine shot Rimbaud twice with a revolver and wounded him, though not severely. He was tried in October, and sentenced to two years in prison. (It was fortunate that this incident took place in Belgium, rather than England.) The poet spent the whole of 1874 in custody in Mons; during that time he reconverted to Catholicism, receiving communion. He was released in January 1875; a few months later he took up a position as a teacher in Stickney, Lincolnshire. The text for Prison – Fauré’s pithy title allows the uninformed listener to place these words in context – appeared without heading in Sagesse, a collection of poetry published in 1881 under a Catholic imprint, evidence of Verlaine’s chastening, albeit only temporary. The song is among Fauré’s most powerful, and it is certainly his most concise. In that most melancholy of keys, E flat minor, the clarity of the light, the muted poignancy of the chiming clock (in octaves on the third beats of bars 4, 7, 10 and 13), the enviable simplicity of life on the outside, the birdsong ruefully appreciated in the distance – all these things are depicted with rigorous economy. In Fauré’s setting the anguished middle section, beginning ‘Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là, / Simple et tranquille’, is no appeal to a higher power, but the self-castigating outburst of a battle-scarred ne’er-do-well (‘God, I’ve been so stupid’). The composer was a master of the religious miniature when he chose, but he ignores the devout penitent of Sagesse who emerges in Séverac’s music for this poem; this is no monastic cell, and the poet’s confession is for all to hear. The final lines are accompanied by inexorably rising harmonic progressions on an E flat pedal. This heartbreaking music signifies an evaporation of youthful hopes, a wasting of life’s vital substances, the disappearance of good fortune over the distant horizon. Debussy had the good sense not to attempt a rival setting. Reynaldo Hahn’s D’une prison has languid charm, but it suggests an idyllic incarceration on a desert island. In the ineluctable rhythmical impulse of Fauré’s music, quiet and gentle though the opening is, we can hear the bars of the poet’s cell, and the iron that has entered his soul. Source: AllMusic (https://www.allmusic.com/artist/gabriel-faur%C3%A9-mn0 000654108/biography) Although originally composed for Voice (Soprano) and Piano, I created this arrangement of "Prison" (Op. 83 No. 1) for Flute & Piano. | |||
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