This week, Bernard Labadie will direct the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré. This concert, planned for spring 2020, now coincides with the centenary year of the composer’s death. In a few weeks, on Friday March 15, Bourgie Hall will mark this anniversary with the remarkable tenor Cyrille Dubois in a recital entitled French melodies of the Belle Époquepreceded by a conference by Sylvain Caron.
Fauré’s first biographer was the composer Charles Koechlin. The author of the Seven Stars’ Symphony is, alongside Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Georges Enesco and Nadia Boulanger, one of the most famous students of Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), who was professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory from 1896 .
The preface to the second edition (1948) of the rare book Gabriel Fauré, first published in 1927, includes a concept that should be taught… to composition teachers in certain schools: “The perfect art of Gabriel Fauré seems as current to us today as it did twenty years ago. Some young composers nowadays make the mistake of asking themselves “what to do” (instead of simply writing, and without a system, what they like). The example of our master would be most beneficial to them. It is both modesty and boldness, freedom and discipline. »
Be yourself
The reflection applies to all these young people who seem to compose to please their academic mentors. But Koechlin also had in his sights the attitude of the composer towards his listeners. He continues: “Fauré’s work, conceived in the ivory tower, shows us that we do not need to “think about the public” to, ultimately, write the most persuasive of music: that, precisely, because it is personal and meaningful, which will best reach the public. This art is the most aristocratic there is, but it is also the most human, the most capable of spreading its benefits to a wide audience. »
Beyond the Atlantic Ocean, 76 years later, what Charles Koechlin wrote here in 1948 particularly resonates a week after the creation of The queen boy. Because what did Julien Bilodeau, this composer and author of three operas, a reviled genre in which no one taught him anything, tell us a week ago? “This art, which requires an elite to practice it, is popular because there is something popular in telling a story. » “I find it fantastic what one can do as a composer in this vein; we can multiply the meaning,” he added.
Let us then return to the Fauré portrayed by Koechlin, who knew him better than all of us: “Fauré, free with regard to fashions and musical dogmas, never cared about whether his music was reactionary or modern. He knew well that the beauty of a work, its personality, and even its novelty do not depend on the more or less unheard of that we find in its vocabulary, but that they depend on the life of the being. interior, to the truth, to the conviction of the accent. »
We can, like Koechlin, sum up the Fauréan life lesson simply: “Be yourself”. In the history of music, sometimes “self” is such a powerful language that it can be easily attributed to a composer. Listen to a work by Bach, Mozart, Brahms or Sibelius that you don’t know. It’s a safe bet that you can attribute it to its composer. The same goes for Dvořák, Shostakovich and, today, Peteris Vasks. Fauré is one of those immediately identifiable composers.
The Requiem
THE Requiem which Bernard Labadie will direct on Wednesday and Thursday in Quebec and on Sunday February 18 in Montreal is the natural and usual gateway to Fauré’s work. However, for a very long time we had a distorted vision of it. Until 1988, the Requiem by Fauré was only known in a symphonic form, known as the “1900 version”. However, this score is the adaptation of an original score, composed in 1887-1888 and revised in 1893.
The truth ” Requiem imagined by Fauré, intimate and autumnal, does not include violins. The composer wanted to avoid the high register and light colors. Only a solo violin evokes a ray of light in the “Sanctus”. But this musical idea of genius did not suit the publisher Hamelle (refer to our article on Bruckner two weeks ago to see the impact, sometimes distressing, of publishers on the course of music!), who considered that , if we could employ all the staff of the orchestra, it would sell more scores. The enlarged version, in fact produced by a student, Jean Roger-Ducasse, was created on July 12, 1900 at the Trocadéro as part of the Universal Exhibition.
Fauré’s original score can be heard in recordings by Michel Corboz (Mirare) and Peter Dijkstra (Sony), in particular. Fortunately, Bernard Labadie will conduct this so-called “1893” version, the first public performance of which, under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe, did not take place until January 16, 1988, at the Madeleine church in Paris.
The dominant idea of the score, perfectly synthesized by Fauré himself, remains: “My Requiem, it was said that he did not express the fear of death. Someone called it a “lullaby of death.” But this is how I feel death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration for happiness beyond, rather than as a painful passage…”
Beyond the Requiem
THE Requiem by Fauré (and the magnificent Canticle by Jean Racine for choir) is a beautiful gateway to vocal music. Fauré is one of the great artisans of the art of French melody, and it will be recalled that Atma recorded the entirety of his melodies, with Olivier Godin, the current artistic director of the Bourgie Hall, on the piano. A magnificent selection will be presented on March 15 by Cyrille Dubois, mirroring melodies from disciples of Fauré, a program concocted in collaboration with the Palazzetto Bru Zane.
In his biography, Koechlin tells us that Fauré cherished above all the collection The good song composed between 1892 and 1894 on the poems of Paul Verlaine: “The flight of The good song, his extraordinary force of life, this passion for light and happiness and all the musical discoveries that it required remain incomparable. Fauré retained a predilection for this unique work in his existence through the optimism, the excitement, the sort of happy exhilaration with which it is constantly animated. »
Take advantage of your listening platforms to (re)discover the absolute stylistic model of this repertoire, Camille Maurane (1911-2010), a perfect example of this ideal voice known as the “Martin baritone”, or light baritone. Everything that Maurane has engraved in French melodies is stunning and unique, even beyond the legendary Charles Panzera, Gérard Souzay and Bernard Kruysen.
Piano music, in which we expect Lucas Debargue’s new album from Sony in March, has long been embodied by Jean-Philippe Collard (EMI-Warner). The Nocturnes and the Barcarolles are works to know, and Marc-André Hamelin has combined them in an admirable two-disc album released in September 2023. For a different approach, Éric Le Sage gave a surprisingly fluid reading of the Nocturnes . As for Philippe Cassard and Jacques Mercier, they produced for La Dolce Volta the perfect disc combining piano and orchestra with Ballad And Fantasy for piano and orchestra, Pelléas and Mélisandethe most famous orchestral score, and three nocturnals for piano.
It is in chamber music that nestles, like the melodies, the complex juice of Fauréan music, a complexity which increases with the high opus numbers. Alpha has brought together in a box set of five CDs the complete chamber music with piano recorded around Éric Le Sage. If we want to take more measured steps, we will start with the sonatas for violin and piano, for example in the version by Pierre Amoyal and Anne Queffélec (Erato), then with the “cello and piano” disc by François Salque and Éric Le Sage, which includes, in addition to the sonatas, the famous Elegy. For the compulsive thrifty, the 12 CD anthology published in 2018 by Warner contains these “essentials”, excluding melodies, in good interpretations at a competitive price.