Faure and French Musical Aesthetics (review)

Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics. By Carlo Caballero. (Music in the Twentieth Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xi, 333 p. ISBN 0-521-78107-8. $64.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Carlo Caballero has chosen his title carefully. He has provided neither a biography of the man nor a genre-by-genre survey of the music. Instead, he has written a study of Fauré the composer—more specifically, of his writings, beliefs, aesthetics, and his relation to la grand ligne. In the latter, Caballero focuses on Fauré's relationship to the musical, literary, and cultural scenes present in France during the composer's lifetime, though also referring to more recent practices like that of Pierre Boulez so as to trace lineages and residues. A rewritten doctoral thesis with an additional final chapter, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics is a fine book, and ought to lead the way towards a reinvigorated understanding of Fauré and his legacy.

Some idea of how Caballero approaches the question of Fauré's relation to French musical aesthetics can be gauged from his choice of chapter titles: "The Question of Sincerity," "Innovation, Tradition," "Originality, Influence, and Self-Renewal," "Homogeneity: Meaning, Risks, and Consequences," "Fauré's Religion: Ideas and Music," and "Fauré the Elusive." From the outset this is a sympathetic study of a specifically French tradition of musical thought. Caballero makes much of the parallels which can be drawn between Fauré and giants in the other arts, notably Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Proust (who modelled Vinteuil on the composer). One of the strengths of this book, though, is that Caballero also provides a wealth of information about and insight into some of the ostensibly more minor characters of the time (such as Jules Combarieu), as well as the huge multitude of practicing music critics now forgotten. What emerges is a welcome thick reading of Fauré's musical world.

Caballero spends most of his time undertaking detailed readings of various texts by Fauré and others, teasing every scrap of significance out of them in search of the composer's musical, aesthetic, and even religious beliefs. As he points out, it is difficult to reconstruct an image of Fauré's aesthetic because the composer himself was extremely wary of, if not dead against, precisely such a project. Probably largely out of modesty (unlike certain other twentieth-century composers), he shied away on almost every occasion from revealing any sort of memorable detail about his music: it was "his concern, independent of Mallarmé's but parallel to it, to abolish the creator's elocutionary persona from the finished work" (p. 253). La vie intérieure was more important to Fauré, which was why so many of his song texts are set within gardens (p. 247); their secluded, peaceful, quiet chronotope was clearly conducive to the composer's artistic beliefs. This puts Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics in a slightly tender position with regard to its subject, since Caballero is forced to read against the grain, against the wishes of his subject. This he does with subtlety and care, though it seems that his magnifying glass occasionally burns a hole in the rather fragile texts under scrutiny.

In an aptly titled final chapter, Caballero turns his attention to the precise contours of Fauré's reticence. This, he writes, centered on the notion of "evasion." Present in both compositional and personal realms, evasion was manifest in a number of ways both within Fauré's own elusive comments and writings and within his music. Fauré's concern for and control over his posthumous legacy, directly parallel to Proust's attempt to burn his notebooks, though far more successful, was one example (p. 240- 42). Another was Fauré's choice of titles for his works—or rather, their deliberate omission. Another series of evasive maneuvers can be read into the composer's fluid and highly ambiguous metrical and rhythmic language, which Caballero compares in passing to that of Schumann. One of the most revealing instances of real-life evasion occurred...