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...(+)
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).
