Molto moderato
Adagio
Allegretto moderato

No other work by Fauré gave his as much trouble as the First Piano Quintet. The earliest sketches date from 1887 (in the same sketch-book as the ‘Pie Jesu’ from the Requiem), the bulk of the composition was done between 1890 and 1894, and the work was completed and revised in 1903–5. When it was published in 1907, it was not in Paris, but in New York, issued by G. Schirmer. The first performance was given on 23 March 1906 when Fauré himself and a quartet led by Eugène Ysaÿe (the work’s dedicatee) played it in Brussels at the home of Octave Maus. A week later (30 March) they gave it at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

One early enthusiast for the work was the young Aaron Copland. In the early 1920s he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger – a Fauré pupil – and it was through her that Copland came to love this music. In 1924, he published an article in Musical Quarterly entitled ‘Gabriel Fauré: a neglected master’, likening Fauré to Brahms, with ‘a genius as great, a style as individual and a technique as perfect’. Copland described the first movement of the quintet: ‘The initial theme is an excellent example of that continuity of line that [is] peculiar to Faure’s late manner. A short subsidiary theme for strings alone, which later plays so important a part in the development, brings us to the second idea – an ardent, yearning phrase which must convince the most recalcitrant ear of Faure’s great powers of melody-making. Note with what technical mastery the recapitulation is made the inevitable climax of the development and is so varied as to take away all feeling of repetition.’ The extended Adagio – melancholy and introspective – is followed by a last movement that Copland described as ‘a sort of combination Scherzo–Finale’.

Nigel Simeone

Nahandove, O belle nahandove! 
Aoua! Aoua! Mefiez-vous des blancs! 
Il est doux de se coucher 
 

The Chansons madécasses, scored for voice, flute, cello and piano, were commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and composed in 1925–6. The texts by Évariste de Parny (1753–1814) are among the earliest prose poems in French, published in 1787. Equally striking are the strong anti-colonialist sentiments of these poems written by a French aristocrat who had been born on what is now the island of Réunion, east of Madagascar. Ravel himself wrote that the songs included ‘a new element, dramatic, even erotic, as a result of the subject matter of Parny’s poems’, and there is no doubting the sensuous erotic charge in ‘Nahandove’. But there is drama of a different kind in the powerfully anti-slavery themes of the second song, ‘Aoua!’, beginning with the warning ‘Méfiez-vous des blancs’ (‘Do not trust the white men’), its words lamenting the violence of the settlers who dispossessed and then enslaved the indigenous population. Ravel creates a harsh and terrifying musical counterpart for the poem, with unflinching dissonance, piercing high notes and motoric rhythms. This is Ravel at his most experimental, and also at his most provocative. The third song comes as a relief, somehow serving to ease the impact of ‘Aoua!’ And yet for all the stillness and simplicity of ‘Il est doux de se coucher’, there is no easy serenity.  

© Nigel Simeone

Très vite et emporté

Divertissement. Andantino

Finale. Prestissimo

The Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn was a work over which Poulenc lavished a great deal of time and effort – the final results did not come easily or quickly. First performed in its original version at an all-Poulenc concert at the Salle Chopin in Paris on 19 June 1931 (and described in the Chesterian magazine as one of two ‘intelligent and lovely’ new compositions heard that evening), Poulenc reworked the Sextet several times before it reached a definitive form in 1939. On 29 August 1939 he wrote to Marie-Blanche Polignac that he had ‘thoroughly revised my entire Sextet (now very good)’. The result of this decade of reflection and rewriting is indeed ‘very good’: Poulenc’s most imposing chamber work is notable from the outset for its muscularity and seriousness – though the central ‘Divertissement’ provides an oasis of Mozartian repose – and, after an almost wild Prestissimo, the finale closes with an epilogue notable for its solemn stillness: Stravinsky-like austerity here is softened by Poulenc’s more emollient harmonic language. The first performance of the Sextet in its finished form took place during the early months of the German Occupation of Paris, on 9 December 1940, at a concert given by the Association de Musique Contemporaine, with Poulenc at the piano and the Quintette à vent de Paris. Poulenc kept the manuscript to himself during the years of the war and eventually sent it to Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen for publication in 1945. This brought to an end what Poulenc’s biographer Carl B. Schmidt has aptly described as ‘one of the most complicated compositional sagas of Poulenc’s career.’ Poulenc recorded the Sextet not with the original French players, but with the Philadelphia Wind Quintet in March 1960, during one of his last visits to the United States.

Nigel Simeone © 2010

La bonne chanson was the most ambitious of Fauré’s settings of Verlaine’s poetry. The first eight songs were completed in 1893 but the ninth was only added in February 1894. A true cycle, La bonne chanson has several recurring themes which bring musical unity to the whole structure. According to the Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux, the result is ‘far more than just a volume of songs. It reaches the proportions almost of a vocal symphony.’ The inspiration for the work was the singer Emma Bardac, with whom Fauré became infatuated in the early 1890s. She gave Fauré advice about revisions while he was working on the songs, and sang them in private at her home in Bougival, with the composer at the piano. La bonne chanson was first given in a concert by the tenor Maurice Bagès on 25 April 1894. Bagès also gave the first London performance on 1 April 1898 (at Frank Schuster’s home in Old Queen Street) and it was for this occasion that Fauré made the version for piano and string quintet (though he later wondered if this arrangement was ‘unnecessary’, it has a tone colour all its own, quite distinct from the solo piano version). Reactions to the new cycle were mixed: Marcel Proust was enchanted by it, writing that ‘I adore this collection’, but he noted that Debussy (who later married Emma Bardac) thought it was ‘too complicated.’ History has come down firmly on Proust’s side: La bonne chanson is recognised as one of Fauré’s greatest achievements, combining sophisticated musical design with lyrical inspiration.  

© Nigel Simeone