It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and rhythms that nudge us towards the future. No other composer deploys such subversive mastery of the conventions of French music: again and again, if we look underneath the arches of his melodies, we find ambiguous chromatic shifts or disorientating spiralling arpeggios.
For some critics, the musical argument of Fauré’s late chamber work is so understated it evaporates
And – see above – no other French composer is so hard to describe without falling into a purple puddle. I’ve already used up spellbinding, subversive and ambiguous, but that still leaves subtle, sophisticated, exquisite, reflective and a dozen other adjectives before we reach the laziest but most useful of them all: elusive. That word is a get-out-of-jail-free card: ‘Fauré is a composer, subtle, elusive and precise’… ‘Fauré’s music tends to be elusive, sometimes cryptic’… ‘The mélodies of Gabriel Fauré lie at the heart of his romantic but elusive style’, etc.
Mostly this elusiveness is presented as a virtue and of course it can be: some of the towering masterpieces of the classical canon are written in perplexing language that demands repeated listening. It’s true of the late Beethoven string quartets, and that’s an analogy often employed by Fauré enthusiasts because both composers wrote their late chamber music when they were severely deaf.
Fauré’s ordeal strikes us as less devastating than Beethoven’s because it began when he was in his mid-fifties rather than his late twenties – that is, before he became head of the Paris Conservatoire, a position he held from 1905 until 1920. But he had to endure the added torment of aural hallucinations, causing him to hear low and high notes grotesquely out of tune.
You’d think that would disqualify him from running France’s most august musical institution – yet he clung on until he was 75 because he was engaged in a bloody fight to modernise the Conservatoire, which as late as 1900 revered Auber and Meyerbeer and banned Wagner. To quote the cellist Steven Isserlis, one of Fauré’s greatest champions, ‘the gentle composer astounded everyone by introducing drastic reforms, sweeping away the crusty traditions that had reigned for generations’. His enemies called him Robespierre, an unlikely nickname for the elegant figure who drifted through the grandest Parisian salons, cigarette waving as he gossiped with Proust.
It was only after retiring, however, that he really threw caution to the wind, moving beyond the harmonic twists and delicate syncopations that coloured his middle-period masterpieces such as the First Piano Quartet and the Requiem. His Second Piano Quintet of 1921 achieves an eerie translucence, reducing the accompaniment to ‘a whisper of pianistic droplets’, as his biographer Émile Vuillermoz described it.
His last work, the String Quartet of 1924, is austere and wistful; here it’s easy to make the argument that ill-health and deafness led Fauré, like Beethoven, into a private and sometimes inaccessible contemplation of eternity. But, unlike Beethoven’s late quartets, it’s rarely performed or recorded. For some critics, the musical argument is so understated that it evaporates. When they describe Fauré as an elusive composer they mean it as a backhanded compliment. After all, no one would use that label to describe Beethoven, however difficult it is to grasp the Grosse Fuge on first hearing. Nor is it applied to Fauré’s rival Debussy or to his pupil Ravel, even though both of them revelled in harmonic ambiguity. One pianist celebrated for his Debussy told me he enjoys browsing through Fauré’s solo pieces, but doesn’t feel there’s enough musical substance to justify the challenge of tackling them in public.
Is it our fault that Fauré’s music isn’t as celebrated as his admirers think it deserves to be? It’s impressive that in this centenary year his loudest champions are world-class singers and instrumentalists. For example, Lucas Debargue, the maverick piano virtuoso widely admired for his electrifying Scarlatti, Ravel and Szymanowski, has just recorded Fauré’s complete solo piano music for Sony. He writes that as a youth, ‘listening to his music for solo piano left on me the impression of a language that is sleek, mechanical and occasionally opaque’.
Then, during the pandemic, he sight read the Nine Preludes Op. 103, composed in 1909 and 1910. ‘I was immediately struck by the profound originality and mastery of these brief pieces from Fauré’s final period.’ Yet Debargue still felt that their harmonic language was beyond his grasp: ‘To decipher Fauré’s ultimate enigmas I needed to draw on all the passion that I have invested in studying tonal harmony over the years.’
According to the Fauré specialist James Kidd, ‘anyone wishing to get below the surface of Fauré’s music is confronted by a reserved and genuinely unassuming personality, sometimes puckish but never flamboyant… Fauré’s directness and simplicity are disarming. His sophisticated innocence defies analysis’. Maybe that’s because sophisticated innocence is a contradiction in terms – but in this case it does seem to fit both the music and the man.
Fauré may have antagonised the old guard at the Conservatoire, but everyone else adored him. Hostesses couldn’t resist his cultivated self-effacement – and, though you might not guess it to look at him, he couldn’t resist hostesses. When the ugly, conceited Debussy cheated on his wife Lilly with the singer Emma Bardac, later his second wife, Lilly shot herself – but survived. Fauré was so disgusted that he cut off relations with Debussy, a principled stance complicated by the fact that Emma had previously been his own lover.
During that affair Fauré wrote his Dolly Suite for Emma’s daughter, of whom he was (probably wrongly) rumoured to be the biological father. He loved to chase younger women, both in Paris and in his beloved London, where he stayed with his friend, the gay socialite Frankie Schuster in, appropriately, Old Queen Street – at number 22, now the offices of The Spectator. It was here that, on 1 April 1898, the tenor Maurice Bagès gave the first performance of a new version of La bonne chanson, Fauré’s setting of nine Verlaine poems, arranged for piano and string quintet. (Our chief music critic Richard Bratby has made the inspired suggestion that the work should be revived at a Spectator summer party: ‘Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air.’)
But we need to go further back in Fauré’s history to understand why his music is so instantly recognisable. He began his musical life as an organist and stuck to it for decades, acquiring an exhaustive knowledge of Gregorian chant that shaped even his most exotic mélodies. (Listen to his famous Pavane: in places the tune snakes like plainchant.) His works for solo piano and chamber ensemble are also haunted by the modal scales of the monks, which isn’t to say that they sound religious – but, without that influence, Fauré wouldn’t have achieved the unsettling blend of major and minor that produces his trademark air of fragile melancholy.
‘It’s as if he was bullied at school by a perfect cadence, and resolved never to write another one in his life,’ says the Israeli pianist Ariel Lanyi. He’s speaking affectionately, but for some of us a little fragile melancholy goes a long way.
You may find this enchanting, annoying, or a bit of both. A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the concerts in the Wigmore Hall’s festival of Fauré’s chamber music. Steven Isserlis, Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk joined forces in the Second Piano Quartet and First Piano Quintet – luxury casting for sweeping performances that nonetheless captured every nuance in the score. The audience was in raptures and excited about the next instalment, but I decided I wasn’t up to another evening of deciphering Fauré’s ultimate enigmas. My loss, no doubt: David Nice of the Arts Desk found the final concert such a transcendent experience that the memory of it temporarily calmed his despair at the impudence of American voters.
In the end, I suppose, ‘elusive’ will have to do for me. It’s not fair to pigeonhole Fauré as a miniaturist. If his most perfect creations are his art songs, his Requiem soars gloriously above the salon; in the solo piano and chamber music we glimpse the epic ambitions of a great composer through the veil of subtlety. But if you’re not in the mood you find yourself longing for a blast of Jimi Hendrix.
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