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. 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 complex harmonic and melodic style.
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.
Influences on Fauré, particularly in his early work, include not only Chopin, but also Mozart and Schumann. In contrast with his harmonic and melodic style, which pushed the bounds for his time, Fauré’s rhythmic motives tended to be subtle and repetitive, with little to break the flow of the line, although he used discreet syncopations, similar to those found in Brahms’s works. Copland referred to him as “the Brahms of France.” The music critic Jerry Dubins suggested that Fauré “represents the link between the late German Romanticism of Brahms. . .and the French Impressionism of Debussy.”
Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11
The text, “Verbe égal au Très-Haut” (“Word, one with the Highest”), is a French paraphrase by Jean Racine of a Latin hymn from the breviary for matins, Consors paterni luminis. Nineteen-year-old Fauré set the text in 1864–65 for a composition competition at the École Niedermeyer de Paris, and it won him the first prize. The work was first performed the following year in a version with accompaniment of strings and organ. The style shows similarities with his later Requiem. Today, the two works are often performed together.
Zachary Gates noted in a paper dedicated to the work: “The long sweeping melodies and strong melodic and harmonic appoggiaturas in Cantique are a testament to the Romantic side of the piece, but there is a definite contemporary tint to what he’s writing, hidden in very minute and well-justified atonal note choices in the harmonic structure and melody. After ten years of training at the school focused on liturgy, Fauré was able to set the inspiring text with a gorgeously restrained and respectful charm.”
Madrigal, Op. 35
This four-part song, set to words by Armand Silvestre, was composed in 1883. It is written to be sung by vocal quartet or choir, with piano or orchestral accompaniment.
Fauré had a liking for Silvestre’s poems and set several of them. This one, titled “Pour un chœur alterné,” is from Silvestre’s 1878 collection La chanson des heures. With its theme of young men and women accusing each other of selfishness and cruelty in affairs of the heart, Fauré set it as a mischievous wedding present for his friend and ex-pupil André Messager. The pianist and scholar Graham Johnson commented that the song has “the wittiness and suggestiveness of a speech by the best man at a wedding.”
Requiem, Op. 48
Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in the late 1880s, revising it in the 1890s, and finishing it in 1900. This setting of the shortened Catholic Mass for the Dead in Latin is the best-known of his large works. Its focus is on eternal rest and consolation. He composed the work not to the memory of a specific person but, in his words, “for the pleasure of it.” It has been described as “a lullaby of death” because of its predominantly gentle tone. Fauré revised the Requiem over the years, and a number of different performing versions are now in use, from the earliest, for small forces, to the final revision with full orchestra. It was performed at his own funeral in 1924 and was first performed in the United States in 1931.
In seven movements, the work is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed choir, instruments, ,and organ. Following the French Baroque tradition, the full sequence Dies irae is omitted, replaced by its section Pie Jesu. Reference to the day of judgment appears in the Libera me, which, along with the final movement In Paradisum, is based on a text that is not part of the liturgy of the funeral Mass but of the Order of Burial. Fauré wrote of the work, “Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.”
Marie Juliette “Lili” Boulanger (1893–1918) was a French composer and the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize. Her older sister was the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.
As a Paris-born child prodigy, Lili Boulanger’s talent was apparent at the age of two, when Gabriel Fauré, a friend of the family, discovered she had perfect pitch. Her parents, both of whom were musicians, encouraged their daughter’s musical education. Her mother, Raissa Myshetskaya, was a Russian princess who married her Paris Conservatoire teacher, Ernest Boulanger, also a Prix de Rome winner. Lili Boulanger’s grandfather Frédéric Boulanger had been a noted cellist and her grandmother Juliette, a singer.
Boulanger grew up in a time of musical transition and her music fits easily into what was becoming defined as a post-Romantic style. Like Debussy, Boulanger associated herself more with Symbolism than Impressionism, with her music featuring the sense of obscurity and indirection more common in Symbolism. However, she explored the Impressionists’ harmonic palette. While much of Boulanger’s music reflects the feelings of isolation and alienation that were starting to emerge during the twentieth century, it also reveals her own struggles with depression and loneliness caused by a long-term illness. She often chose texts that conveyed a strong sense of hopelessness and sadness, as seen in her song Demain fera un an: “Nothing more. I have nothing more, nothing to sustain me” and “I seem to feel a weeping within me, a heavy, silent sobbing, someone who is not there”.
Sous bois: Dennis Keen, artistic director of Voices of Ascension, wrote on their website: “This exquisite piece is virtually unknown and was out of print for decades. I believe this performance [March 20, 2019] was actually the NY Premiere even though the piece was composed in the early years of the 20th century. The work ([a setting of a] poem by Philippe Gille) depicts two lovers on a walk in the woods and their tender remembrance of it.”
Henk Badings (1907–1987) was born in Java when it was still a Dutch colony; he later acknowledged the influence of Indonesian music heard in childhood as the source for his adult interest in microtonal scales. Badings was a largely self-taught musician who was able to function at the highest levels of academic teaching.
When Badings graduated from Delft Politechnical Institute in 1931, he initially turned to geology and engineering, the trades for which he studied, but the desire to compose proved too strong. He received a number of commissions, and from 1935, began to teach as well, accepting the position of head at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague from the Nazi-controlled Dutch government in 1942, replacing of the sitting director, who was Jewish. Although this did not make Badings a “Nazi collaborator” in the conventional sense, this decision would have fatal ramifications concerning Badings’ later career.
In the 1960s an inquiry into that incident permanently devastated his reputation in Holland: Badings’ music was banned from Dutch radio, and his music disappeared from the concert halls. He was still permitted to teach, and his students highly valued his insights. However, his name has remained practically unknown in Holland, even though it appears on practically all short lists of great Dutch composers. His international reputation was not as strongly affected.
Badings composed more than 1,000 works and wrote for practically every instrumental combination available to him. Badings had an innate sense of formal development, a preference for luxuriant textures, and a taste for exoticism.
Trois Chansons Bretonnes
This setting of three French poems by Théodore Botrel was composed in 1946. While all three movements are part of the same cycle, each work is thematically independent from the others and tells its own story.
La nuit en mer enters the minds and hearts of fishermen marveling at the ocean on a quiet night. The voices of the choir move gently with the waves of the piano accompaniment like an evening in a fishing boat on the calm sea. As the fisherman go to sleep, they imagine the beauty of the sea and how eager they are to sail in the morning with the rising sun.
La complainte des âmes is both a lament and a prayer. The unaccompanied voices, in what can almost be considered a chant, pray to the Virgin Mary, expressing the bitter pains of souls lost to the fires of Purgatory. With eerie harmonies, they pray for the souls of the mothers and fathers whose children will not pray for them.
Soir d’été begins, like La nuit en mer, at the end of the day. Two lovers rush home before dark, but not before taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the sensuous world around them. The light-hearted music accompanies the gaiety of the couple’s hearts. Then quickly, before they lose themselves too much in the timelessness of love, they hurry home on a warm summer night.
Sources:
California State Long Beach Chamber Choir - Program Notes, March 21, 2015
Wikipedia
Voices of Ascension
– Patricia Jennerjohn