Requiem, op. 48, pour soli, choeur, et orchestre symphonique: Version de concert, 1900 (review)

Gabriel Fauré. Requiem, op. 48, pour soli, chœur et orchestre symphonique. Version de concert, 1900. Partition d'orchestre éditée par Jean-Michel Nectoux. Paris: J. Hamelle; distribution Alphonse Leduc, c1998. [Nomenclature, p. iv; forward in Fr., Eng., Ger., p. v-xiii; facsims., p. xiv-xv; performance notes, p. xvii-xix; score, 118 p.; crit. notes, p. 120-133. AL 28 944. $68.]

Who would have thought that Gabriel Fauré's quiet and unassuming Requiem, a classic chestnut enjoyed and performed for over a hundred years by unsuspecting ecclesiastical, lay, professional, and scholarly musicians, harbors mysteries and pitfalls for any who have cared to try to crack it? Careful readers of any of the numerous reprint scores and instrumental parts based on the original publication of this work, now firmly in the public domain, will have noticed many errors and inconsistencies, due in part to Fauré's inattentive proofreading of his own work and the long and complex gestation period of his Requiem.

Fauré wrote the Requiem for fun in 1888 and used it for the funeral services of a distinguished parishioner of the Church of the Madeleine, where the composer was organist and music director for many years. He continued to tinker with the work through the years, enlarging both the instrumentation and number of movements and conducting several public performances. By 1893, he had an agreement for publication that never came to fruition. Fauré conducted the version most known and performed today, however, at the Trocadero Palace during the Universal Exposition of 1900. Based on this history, Nectoux and other musicologists justify two versions of the Requiem approved by Fauré. The 1893 work, called the "church version," requires a small chamber orchestra consisting of horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani, harp, solo violin, and a string orchestra without violins. About forty boys and men sang the performances Fauré conducted at the Madeleine. The 1900 performance at the Trocadero featured a full orchestra and choir, a total of 250 musicians. This can be called the "concert version"--Fauré's subtle vision of death's calm release adapted for the more violent and noisy twentieth century.

To the relief of conscientious conductors and performers, we now have critical editions of both the 1893 church version and the 1900 concert version--several, in fact. Suffice it to say that the most dependable are the edition of the church version edited by Jean-Michel Nectoux and Roger Delage published in 1995 (reviewed by me in Notes 54, no. 2 [December 1997]: 574-76) and Nectoux's edition of the concert version under review here. The editors undertook an exhaustive investigation and evaluation of the sources to complete their task. In my earlier review, I evaluated these and some of the other efforts at disentangling the textual problems of the Requiem, including the various editions published by C. F. Peters (ed. Reiner Zimmermann and Nectoux, ca. 1978), Eulenburg (ed. Roger Fiske and Paul Inwood, 1978), and Hinshaw Music and later the Oxford University Press (ed. John Rutter, 1984/1988).

Unfortunately, the mysteries continue. Nectoux records the principal sources for the 1900 concert version as the orchestral score published in 1900 by Hamelle (and since reprinted many times by various publishers such as Dover, International Music, and Kalmus); a copy of the Hamelle publication annotated by Nadia Boulanger, organist for performances of the Requiem conducted by Fauré; and the vocal score prepared by Fauré's pupil Roger Ducasse, also published by Hamelle. No manuscript sources, autograph or otherwise, for either the concert version or the vocal score seem to have survived. The principal sources for the 1893 church version include a complex of autograph manuscript, copyist, and published sources described in the critical edition and my review. Nectoux lists these as secondary sources for the concert version.

A reading of Nectoux's critical notes for the concert version shows that much of the job of preparing this edition involved correcting engraving...