Faure's place?

I've been exploring Faure tentatively for some time now... like listening to his Requiem and the fabulous chamber music, playing through the Barcarolles and Nocturnes, listening to the few Casadesus recordings and the Naxos CD with the Barcarolles and the Ballade... and I just started work on the Theme and Variations in C-sharp minor, which I'm determined to put into my repertoire.

But I have a hard time putting the man into a category. Every time I think that he really is just a Romantic, and along with Franck among the most austere of them all, I notice something Impressionistic. Whole-tone scales. Shimmering textures which are subdued, not Lisztian. The occasional Wagnerian turn, as in the 2nd Barcarolle. There are elements which seem to foreshadow Impressionism, but none of his music is really in that idiom. He definitely seems to belong to the absolute-music camp of Schumann and Brahms, which makes this assimilation of alien elements puzzling. Am I just thinking too hard?

I generally don't worry about how to categorize a composer. The best almost always have conflicting elements in their music that makes strict classification difficult.

By the way, I have loved Faure for many years, the chamber and piano music particularly. I found the qualities of the orchestral music (and also the Requiem) to be more fleeting, but the chamber and piano music just deepens for me as time passes.

Why do you have to put him into a category? Why is being Faure not sufficient?

: Am I just thinking too hard?

No, but you now have an opportunity to learn something about his biography and his place in music history that will help answer some of your questions. (Hint: start by disabusing yourself of the notion that Wagner didn't influence Franck and his successors. Hint #2: can you name Ravel's

'Sonarrat' < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it > schrieb im Newsbeitrag

I agree, but I feel the core of his art is his mélodies.

I don't know Faure's 'place' either but I also agree with Mr Schultz that one should not necessarily approach music in that way.

I love his chamber music. Many years ago I heard a work by Faure I had never heard of called the Shylock Suite......aged memory tells me that it has at least one movement for a tenor but I've never seen it again anywhere.

Another French composer whose place I do not know but whose ballet music I found most imaginative is Gabriel Pierne.

Kind regrds, Alan M. Watkins

Pierne also wrote a very fine violin sonata whose acquaintance I recently made.

Paul Goldstein

Maybe.

Beyond what you say above

Yes and no. Debussy's Estampes and Images I don't come until 1903, Preludes I not until 1910-11.

I've also seen an 1895 date for the the Theme and Variations.

Either way, this is much earlier than what I mean by late Faure.

String Quartet 1924 Cello Sonatas 1917 and 1921 Second Piano Quintet 1919-21 The first piano quintet has a complicated history and may not be a-propos. Anyway it didn't premiere until 1906 Op 103 Preludes 1910-11

For an example of what I had in mind above, consider the utterly ambiguous tonality of the f-sharp minor Nocturne Op 104 No 1. This is not what I would call looking backward. And here's what one Philippe Mougeot says about Op 103 in some liner notes: 'The writing amazingly foreshadows an entire future trend in music, as for instance this prelude No. 1, almost completely abstract, with disturbing flights into atonality, or the 9th, extraordinarily immaterial, apparently composed in a sort of daze.'

(Kind of a dumb phrase, that last, but when you hear the prelude it's immediately clear what it means.)

Delighted to be of some use. Agree about the Chopin that's there

Gwendolyn Mok