PROGRAM NOTES
Gabriel FAURÉ
(1845-1924)
Pelleas et Melisande Suite, opus 80
Gabriel Fauré was born in 1845 in the Ariège district in the south of France. The son of a village schoolteacher, he showed early talent and was sent to Paris to receive a musical education from the Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer, who specialized in church music. Fauré held various posts as organist in Rennes and in the capital, where he followed Camille Saint-Saëns at the church of the Madeleine. He became closely associated with a group of composer friends including Edouard Lalo, Henri Duparc, and Emmanuel Chabrier. In 1905, after an unproductive period of depression, he was appointed Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Increasing deafness eventually forced his retirement, though he kept composing music of high-quality until his death in 1924.
Claude Debussy was in the audience the night Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande was premiered in Paris in May of 1893, and he quickly secured the musical rights and set to work on an operatic version. Initially, Debussy was offered the opportunity to compose music for the 1898 London production of the play. Arguing that his score wasn’t suitable for such an adaptation, he declined the opportunity. Attention then turned to Fauré. The celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campell commissioned incidental music from Fauré for the London production, in English. Fauré composed this music between May 16 and June 5 of 1898 and conducted the premiere in the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on June 21 of the same year. Debussy, whose opera was still not complete, was particularly grumpy when he learned of Fauré’s success, dismissing the composer he had once admired as “the musical servant of a group of snobs and imbeciles.”
A decade after the London premiere, Fauré re-scored three of the seventeen musical cues as a concert suite which was premiered on December 1, 1912. To complete the suite, Fauré included a reworking of his Sicilienne, originally composed in 1893 for cello and piano.
The plot of Pelleas et Melisande is simple with the only action being set in motion by a trio of characters: the helpless, childlike Melisande; Golaud, who rescues and marries her; and Pelleas, Golaud’s younger stepbrother, who falls in love with Melisande. Golaud eventually kills Pelleas, and Melisande dies in childbirth. The emotions of the play are quite complex and varied, and include love, jealousy, betrayal, heartbreak, and forgiveness. “His music came,” Mrs. Campbell remarked in her memoirs, “- he had grasped with most tender inspiration the poetic purity that pervades M. Maeterlinck’s lovely play.”
OF NOTE: La mort de Mélisande was played at Fauré's funeral as his coffin was carried from the church.
Charles Camille SAINT-SAENS
(1835–1921)
Cello Concerto in a minor, opus 33
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French composer Charles Camille Saint Saëns (1835-1921) is, perhaps, best known for his orchestral work The Carnival of the Animals. His long life spanned nearly the entire duration of the Romantic period of music. Born in Paris to a government clerk (who died only three months after his son's birth), Camille was raised by his mother with the aid of her aunt, who introduced Camille to the piano. He turned out to be one of the most talented musical child prodigies of all time, beginning studies of the piano and composition at age two. He was also in possession of perfect pitch. His precociousness was not limited to music as he could read and write by the time he was three and had learned Latin by the age of seven. At ten years of age, he gave his debut public recital at the Salle Pleyel, playing Mozart, Handel, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, and Bach. As an encore, he offered to play any of the thirty two Beethoven piano sonatas from memory.
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In the late 1840s, Saint Saëns entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied organ and composition. He won many top prizes and the reputation these awards garnered him resulted in his introduction to Franz Liszt, who became one of his closest friends. For income, he played the organ at various churches in Paris. From 1857-1877, he served as organist at the Église de la Madeleine, where his weekly improvisations stunned the Parisian public and earned Liszt's 1866 observation that Saint Saëns was the greatest organist in the world.
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From 1861 to 1865, Saint Saëns held his only teaching position as professor of piano at the École Niedermeyer, where he raised eyebrows by including contemporary music - Liszt, Gounod, Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner - along with the school's otherwise conservative curriculum of Bach and Mozart. His most successful students at the Niedermeyer included Gabriel Fauré, who was Saint Saëns's favorite pupil and soon became his closest friend.
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Saint Saëns was a multi faceted intellectual as well. From an early age, he studied geology, archaeology, botany, and mathematics. Later, in addition to composing, performing, and writing musical criticism, he held discussions with Europe's finest scientists and wrote scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments. In 1871, he was co-founder of the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a new and specifically French music. In this way, Saint Saëns became a powerful figure in shaping the future of French music.
He continued to write on musical, scientific and historical topics, travelling frequently before spending his final years in Algiers. In recognition of his accomplishments, the government of France awarded him the Legion of Honor. He died of pneumonia at the Hôtel de l'Oasis in Algiers on December 16, 1921, and his body was brought back to Paris for a state funeral at La Madeleine. He was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
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The Cello Concerto in a minor, opus 33 was completed in 1872 and first performed on January 19, 1873 by the Paris Conservatory Orchestra with its distinguished first cellist, August Tolbecque, as soloist. Dedicated to Tolbecque, the concerto is a modest work: engagingly unpretentious, yet far from frivolous or academic, requiring, equally, virtuosic technical and expressive abilities of the soloist. The finely orchestrated score solves the perpetual problem of pitting a lower voiced instrument against a full symphony orchestra. The formal structure of the concerto is not so clear cut as in many standard symphonic works with the music being laid out as one continuous whole. There are distinct movements, linked by the thematic material established at the beginning of the piece, which creates a reassuring familiarity to the concerto.
César FRANCK
(1822-1890)
Symphony in d minor
Born in Liège in 1822, César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck’s father wanted him to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He failed to achieve the necessary distinction as a performer while a student at the Paris Conservatoire and turned his attention to composition. In 1846, he started earning a living in Paris as a teacher and organist. His fame grew as he was offered, and accepted, positions as organist at the newly built church of Sainte Clotilde and as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire. A man of gentle character, he exercised considerable influence through his classes and performances although he remained, as a composer, something of an outsider. He was quite popular, however, with his students and a group of young composers, among them Vincent d'Indy, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, and Paul Dukas, greatly admired his highly individual post-Romantic style, with its rich, innovative harmonies, sometimes terse melodies, and skilled contrapuntal writing. Franck was also a man of strong religious convictions, which often motivated him to compose works based on biblical texts. An unfortunate accident involving a cab and a horse-drawn trolley in July of 1890 started a physical decline from which he never recovered. He died on November 8, 1890. His funeral mass was held at Sainte-Clotilde and attended by a large congregation which included composers Léo Delibes, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Édouard Lalo, and Emmanuel Chabrier.
The Symphony in d minor is, by far, the best-known of Franck's orchestral works. Begun in the summer of 1887, the work was completed in the spring and orchestrated in the summer of 1888, and premiered on February 17, 1889. Although Franck called it a symphony - in response to his students, who quite literally demanded that he try his hand at the form - it is not so much a work in the tradition of Beethoven as a hybrid characteristic of Franck, combining elements of both symphony and symphonic poem in a thematically unified whole. Even in the late 1880s, the French musical public was put off by the unclassifiable nature of the piece. “The subscribers could make neither head nor tail of it,” d'Indy wrote of the chilly reception at the premiere, “and the musical authorities were in much the same position.” Franck actually applied the term “classical” to his Symphony and provided further descriptive tags: an “energetic and warm” first movement, a “sweet and melancholy” Allegretto, and a “radiant, quasi luminous” finale. Perhaps chastened by the cool reception the work received, he wrote no more orchestral works. It was only after his death that the symphony gained popularity with orchestras and audiences alike.
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OF NOTE: The Allegretto is both slow movement and scherzo rolled into one. Its main melody, unfolded at a leisurely pace, is introduced by the English horn, an unconventional choice that particularly offended one of the Paris Conservatoire professors who attended the premiere: “Just mention a single symphony by Haydn or Beethoven with an English horn,” he demanded of d'Indy that night, failing to recall the then (and now) popular Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz that makes use of the instrument in the same context.