The French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote in many genres, including songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces, and choral works.Jones, p. 8 His compositions for piano, written between the 1860s and the 1920s, include some of his best-known works.
Fauré's major sets of piano works are thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, six impromptus, and four valses-caprices. These sets were composed during several decades in his long career, and display the change in his style from uncomplicated youthful charm to a final enigmatic, but sometimes fiery introspection, by way of a turbulent period in his middle years. His other notable piano pieces, including shorter works, or collections composed or published as a set, are Romances sans paroles, Ballade in F major, Mazurka in B major, Thème et variations in C minor, and Huit pièces brèves. For piano duet, Fauré composed the Dolly Suite and, together with his friend and former pupil André Messager, an exuberant parody of Wagner in the short suite Souvenirs de Bayreuth.
Much of Fauré's piano music is difficult to play, but is rarely virtuosic in style. The composer disliked showy display, and the predominant characteristic of his piano music is a classical restraint and understatement.
Background Although for much of his career he made his living as a church organist, Fauré greatly preferred the piano.Nectoux (1991), p. 41 He never underestimated the challenges in composing for the instrument; he wrote, "In piano music there's no room for padding – one has to pay cash and make it consistently interesting. It's perhaps the most difficult genre of all."Nectoux (1991), p. 380 (2004 1st paperback edition) Although his publishers insisted on descriptive titles, Fauré said that his own preference would be for utilitarian labels such as "Piano piece No. X". His works for the piano are marked by a classical French lucidity;Slonimsky, Nicholas. "Fauré, Gabriel (-Urbain)", Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Schirmer Reference, New York, 2001, accessed 8 September 2010 he was unimpressed by pianistic display, commenting of keyboard virtuosi, "the greater they are, the worse they play me."Nectoux (1991), p. 379 Even a virtuoso such as Franz Liszt said that he found Fauré's music hard to play: at his first attempt he said to Fauré, "I've run out of fingers".Nectoux (1991), p. 51 Fauré's years as an organist influenced the way he laid out his keyboard works, often using arpeggiated figures, with themes distributed between the two hands, requiring fingerings more natural for organists than pianists.Jones, p. 51. This tendency may have been even stronger because Fauré was ambidextrous, and he was not always inclined to follow the convention that the melody is in the right hand and the accompaniment in the left. His old friend and former teacher Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to him in 1917, "Ah! if there is a god for the left hand, I should very much like to know him and make him an offering when I am disposed to play your music; the 2nd Valse-Caprice is terrible in this respect; I have however managed to get to the end of it by dint of absolute determination."Nectoux and Jones, pp. 118–119
As a man, Fauré was said to possess "that mysterious gift that no other can replace or surpass: charm",Morrison, p. 14 and charm is a conspicuous feature of many of his early compositions. His early piano works are influenced in style by Chopin, and throughout his life he composed piano works using similar titles to those of Chopin, notably nocturnes and barcarolles. An even greater influence was Schumann, whose piano music Fauré loved more than any other.Nectoux (1991), p. 43 The authors of The Record Guide (1955) wrote that Fauré learnt restraint and beauty of surface from Mozart, tonal freedom and long melodic lines from Chopin, "and from Schumann, the sudden felicities in which his development sections abound, and those codas in which whole movements are briefly but magically illuminated."Sackville-West, pp. 263–64 When Fauré was a student at the École Niedermeyer his tutor had introduced him to new concepts of harmony, no longer outlawing certain chords as "dissonant". By using unresolved mild discords and colouristic effects, Fauré anticipated the techniques of Impressionist composers.
In later years Fauré's music was written under the shadow of the composer's increasing deafness, becoming gradually less charming and more austere, marked by what the composer Aaron Copland called "intensity on a background of calm." The critic Bryce Morrison has noted that pianists frequently prefer to play the accessible earlier piano works, rather than the later music, which expresses "such private passion and isolation, such alternating anger and resignation" that listeners are left uneasy.Morrison, p. 7 The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux writes:
Nocturnes
The nocturnes, along with the barcarolles, are generally regarded as the composer's greatest piano works.Morrison, p. 12 Fauré greatly admired the music of Chopin, and was happy to compose in forms and patterns established by the earlier composer. Morrison notes that Fauré's nocturnes follow Chopin's model, contrasting serene outer sections with livelier or more turbulent central episodes. The composer's son Philippe commented that the nocturnes "are not necessarily based on rêveries or on emotions inspired by the night. They are lyrical, generally impassioned pieces, sometimes anguished or wholly elegiac."Quoted in Nectoux (1991), p. 48
Nocturne No. 1 in E minor, Op. 33/1 () Nectoux rates the first nocturne as one of the best of the composer's early works.Nectoux (1991), p. 49 It is dedicated, like Fauré's song "Après un rêve", to his friend and early patron Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux.Nectoux (1991), p. 34 Morrison calls the piece "cloistered and elegiac." Though published as the composer's Op. 33/1 in 1883, it was written considerably earlier. It opens with a slow, pensive melody, followed by a more agitated second theme and another melody in C major, and ends with the return of the opening theme.Bricard, p. 15 The pianist and academic Sally Pinkas writes that the work contains many hallmarks of Fauré's style, including "undulating rhythms, syncopation of the accompaniment against the melody and layered textures are already in evidence."Pinkas, p. 5
Nocturne No. 2 in B major, Op. 33/2 () The second nocturne opens with a bell-like passage, andantino espressivo, recalling – although Fauré said it was unconscious – the sound of distant bells that he heard frequently when a boy.Nectoux (1991), p. 92 Nectoux singles out "the light footed episode in alternating fifths and sixths" and its extremely delicate passagework, and points to the influence of Fauré's former teacher Saint-Saëns in the allegro ma non troppo toccata section. Saint-Saëns himself declared the piece "absolutely entrancing."Jones, p. 61
Nocturne No. 3 in A major, Op. 33/3 () In the third nocturne, Morrison notes that the composer's fondness for syncopation is at its gentlest, "nostalgia lit by passion." Like its predecessors, it is in tripartite form. An expansive melody with syncopated left-hand accompaniment leads into a middle section in which a dolcissimo theme metamorphoses into bursts of passion.Pinkas, p. 6 The return of the opening section is concluded by a gentle coda that introduces new harmonic subtleties.
Nocturne No. 4 in E major, Op. 36 () The fourth nocturne, dedicated to the Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau, contrasts a lyrical opening section and an episode in E minor with a sombre theme recalling the tolling of a bell. The first theme returns and is followed by a short coda. The pianist Alfred Cortot, generally a great admirer of Fauré, found the piece "rather too satisfied with its languor."
Nocturne No. 5 in B major, Op. 37 () By contrast with its predecessor, the fifth nocturne is more animated, with unexpected shifts into remote keys. Nectoux writes of its undulating outline, and the "almost improvisatory, questioning character" of the opening.
Nocturne No. 6 in D major, Op. 63 (1894)
The sixth nocturne, dedicated to Eugène d'Eichthal, is widely held to be one of the finest of the series. Cortot said, "There are few pages in all music comparable to these." Morrison calls it "among the most rich and eloquent of all Fauré's piano works." The pianist and writer Nancy Bricard calls it "one of the most passionate and moving works in piano literature." Fauré wrote it after a six-year break from composing for the piano. The piece begins with an emotional, outpouring phrase, with echoes of Fauré's song cycle La bonne chanson. The second theme, at first seemingly tranquil, has what the composer Charles Koechlin calls a persistent inquietude, emphasised by the syncopated accompaniment. The initial theme returns, and is followed by a substantial development of a gentle, contemplative melody. A recapitulation of the principal theme takes the piece to its conclusion. Copland wrote that it was with this work that Fauré first fully emerged from the shadow of Chopin, and he said of the piece, "The breath and dignity of the opening melody, the restless C sharp minor section which follows (with the peculiar syncopated harmonies so often and so well used by Fauré), the graceful fluidity of the third idea: all these elements are brought to a stormy climax in the short development section; then, after a pause, comes the return of the consoling first page."Copland, Aaron. "Gabriel Fauré, a Neglected Master". The Musical Quarterly, October 1924, pp. 573–586, Oxford University Press, accessed 20 August 2010
Nocturne No. 7 in C minor, Op. 74 (1898) The seventh nocturne departs from the A–B–A form of Fauré's earlier nocturnes; in Pinkas's view is it constructed more like a ballade than a nocturne.Pinkas, p. 8 It opens with a slow (molto lento) theme of harmonic ambiguity, followed by a second theme, equally ambiguous in key, though nominally in D major. The central section is in F major, and the re-emergence of the first theme brings the piece to a conclusion.Anderson (1993), p. 3 Morrison finds in this piece a sense of bleakness, and of the composer's struggle against despair. Pinkas, however, regards the work as a "contrast between ambiguity and joy, ending in reassurance."Pinkas, p. 9 It is sometimes known as the "English" nocturne, having been composed while Fauré was staying in the UK, and being dedicated to the English pianist Adela Maddison.Orledge, pp. 95 and 303 This nocturne starts with an unusual time signature: .
Nocturne No. 8 in D major, Op. 84/8 (1902) Fauré did not intend the eighth nocturne to appear under that designation. His publisher collected eight short piano pieces together and published them as 8 pièces brèves, allocating each of them a title unauthorised by the composer. The nocturne, the last piece in the set of eight, is shorter and less complex than its immediate predecessor, consisting of a song-like main theme with a delicate semiquaver accompaniment in the left hand.Anderson (1993), pp. 3–4
Nocturne No. 9 in B minor, Op. 97 (1908)
The ninth nocturne, dedicated to Cortot's wife, Clotilde Bréal, is the first of three that share a directness and sparseness in contrast with the more elaborate structures and textures of their predecessors.Nectoux (1991), pp. 381 and 584 The left-hand accompaniment to the melodic line is simple and generally unvaried, and the harmony looks forward to later composers of the 20th century, using a whole-tone scale. Most of the piece is inward-looking and pensive, presaging the style of Fauré's final works, although it ends optimistically in a major key.Pinkas, pp. 9–10
Nocturne No. 10 in E minor, Op. 99 (1908)