Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets (review)

Graham Johnson, Senior Professor of accompaniment at London's Guildhall School of Music, draws on his considerable concert experience and his intimate acquaintance with the vocal repertoire of Gabriel Fauré to present a chronicle of the composer's career through the lens of his mélodies. Although the author may not have "broken a great deal of new musicological ground" in the process (as he himself puts it in his "Foreward and Acknowledgements"), he has produced a very attentive study of Fauré's songs that locates them in the context of social, political, and literary history and in that of Fauré's development as a composer.

The songs are treated in chronological order by date of composition; the discussion is divided into chapters. For each piece, the text is given in French and in English (translations by Richard Stokes); short biographies of the poets are also supplied. While Johnson does not attempt technical analysis of the music—that being outside the intent of the work—he does describe each song. In this, he continues in the critical tradition of Vladimir Jankélévitch, for whose approach to Fauré's music he professes his admiration.

The two concluding chapters of the book are a series of short essays in which the author expresses his opinions on a number of matters, both practical and philosophical, related to performance-both that of singer and that of the accompanying pianist. What is offered here, quite effectively, is an expanded version of comments and reflections that would be offered students in a master class. And, while a student performer absorbs the advice of any teacher and later decides how much of it he or she will follow, such a student would be well-advised to give close attention to the ideas here and to treat them seriously.

The book is beautifully presented and richly illustrated; while the author acknowledges in his forward various sources for the photographs, it would have interested this reader to know the sources of each one.

However, it is unfortunate, given the strengths of the book, that there is a peculiar weakness. Many have had the experience of striking up a casual conversation with a stranger at the next table in a coffee shop or in a library only to have that encounter come to a precipitous and awkward end when the stranger excuses himself to speak to his mother-ship through his secret decoder ring. His partner in conversation will snap to the unhappy realization that the apparently urbane and intelligent stranger is most likely out on a day-pass from the local institution for the gently deranged. Appendix 2 of Johnson's book is the call to the mother-ship. It is a listing of Fauré's vocal works (and some other pieces from the composer's output) by tonality; and to each tonality are ascribed various emotional characteristics. Even if this sort of musical astrology were not a remnant of the nineteenth century (and, in this reviewer's opinion, complete hokum), the premise of this list ignores one important fact: standard pitch has risen nearly a half-tone since Fauré's time. Nadia Boulanger, a pupil of Fauré born in 1887 and a musician gifted with perfect pitch, used to exclaim, "I'm so sick of hearing [Bach's] Mass in B-minor in c-minor and [Beethoven's] Missa Solemnis in Eb!" Similarly, performance of a Fauré song in its original key, whether that key is that of the published version (and the early songs were published in more than one key) or the true "ton original" of the manuscript source, will not yield the same result as it would have in Fauré's time. This otherwise wonderful book would be better off without this section.