Regarding Faure (review)

Regarding Fauré. Edited and translated by Tom Gordon. (Musicology: A Book Series, 19.) Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1999. [xxiii, 426 p. ISBN 90-5700-549-2. $66.]

In which year did Gabriel Fauré retire from the directorship of the Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation? If the answer does not immediately come to mind, listen to some of his music, perhaps the lovely C-Minor Piano Quartet or any of the exquisitely crafted mélodies. After listening, you might be surprised to learn that Fauré retired in 1920, in a Paris that had already left behind the modernism of Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Claude Debussy's Jeux--the Paris of Les Six, a "new simplicity," and music that would come to be described as "neoclassic." Ironically, this new program was partly motivated by the same kind of nationalistic feeling that had inspired the creation of the Société nationale de musique in 1871. Fauré had been a founding member, and perhaps this explains why his critical reputation has, to some degree, languished in the perfumed world of the fin de siècle salon. In fact, Fauré's compositional career did not end in the nineteenth century, but spanned virtually his entire life; his music continued to evolve and deserves a thorough reconsideration.

Thus was conceived a principal theme of the 1995 conference held at Quebec's Bishop's University in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Fauré's birth. Regarding Fauré, edited and translated by Tom Gordon, is a collection of fourteen very fine essays originally given as papers at the conference. The authors include noted scholars Jean-Michel Nectoux, Robert Orledge, Edward R. Phillips, and Steven Huebner. Loosely grouped into four sections--"Context and Criticism," "Mentor and Métier," "Analytic Approaches," and "Les mélodies"--topics invariably overlap; the general sense, fortunately, is not one of redundancy, but rather of increasing richness. As one surmises from the section titles, the essays cover a variety of aspects of the composer's world, including the cultural, the personal, and the critical. Whether addressing Fauré the pedagogue, the music itself, or the character of the man, an underlying current, almost invariably, is the composer's "relative" modernity. While this volume does not attempt a revision that would place Fauré with Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse, the claim here is that he belongs "in the constellation of innovative and visionary twentieth-century composers" (p. xxii).

A picture of Fauré as a man possessed of a "culturally progressive" character gradually emerges throughout the course of the essays. Gail Hilson Woldu, for example, writing about Fauré's years at the Conservatoire, reveals the degree to which the late-nineteenth-century conservatory was circumscribed by a conservative tradition. Fauré is a reformer for suggesting, among other things, that voice teachers "expand their program by including . . . even the admirable Lieder of Schubert and Schumann" (p. 106). The relativity of the term "modern" becomes clearer in a world where a student performance of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" could be considered "almost a revolution" (p. 110). Carlo Caballero offers a complementary view in his article on Fauré's spiritual life as interpreted through the lens of La chanson d'Ève, a setting of poems by Charles Van Lerberghe. Caballero suggests that, like many of the "free thinkers" of the day, the composer experienced a "continuing drift away from the Catholic doctrine of personal resurrection" (p. 323). The setting of La chanson d'Ève reflects a conception of the Genesis story that is pantheistic, secular, and contemporary.

Caballero elucidates his argument with analysis; a refreshing feature of the collection is the inclusion of a variety of analytic approaches. Phillips, in a more systematically theoretical vein, uses the Schenker model to discuss Fauré's subtle undermining of traditional tonal expectations. In a wonderfully focused way, the author shows how, in the Second Violin Sonata, Fauré creates the sense of "being wafted from key to key without being able readily to understand why odd tonal relationships seem in retrospect to...