October-December 2008	Volume 13, Number 4 - Music

Church music by the unchurched: Fauré

This is the second article of a series. R. J. Stove discusses eminent composers who spent most of their lives outside orthodox Catholicism, but who made notable contributions to sacred music.

The Fauré Requiem: seldom if ever can a major sacred work have become more completely detached, in the public mind, from its creator. For every thousand persons who know the Requiem, often through having heard all or part of it at funerals, not one would know enough about Fauré himself to be even aware of his Christian names. (They were Gabriel Urbain.) In many respects Fauré might well have enjoyed this sort of half-celebrity. The least extroverted of French composers, Fauré seemed content to await admirers’ homage rather than to impose himself on them. These admirers have often discerned in him something cat-like, which is accurate enough. His compositional surefootedness possesses a certain feline character, but so too does his innate reserve.

Born at Pamiers in the Pyrenees on 2 May 1845, Gabriel learned self-reliance at an early stage. Even by the standards of a civilisation where parental “quality time” in the modern sense was unimagined, it is remarkable how chilly an upbringing Gabriel had. His parents sent him away, because of his delicate health, to foster-care for no fewer than four years. Scarcely had he shown talent at the piano – and talent is the operative word, rather than a Mozart’s or Mendelssohn’s prodigy status – than he found himself despatched, when still only nine, to an extremely austere musical boarding school: Paris’s École Niedermeyer. There he received much better and broader artistic instruction than he could have gained anywhere else in France, the Paris Conservatoire included. Louis Niedermeyer, the school’s director, inculcated into his trainees a thorough knowledge of Bach, Palestrina, and (an especially powerful influence on Fauré’s melodic style) plainchant. Saint-Saëns, on the school’s teaching staff at the time, became Fauré’s closest friend.

Defiance

After finishing his extended (1854-65) Niedermeyer studies, Fauré obtained his first permanent musical job, as organist to the church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes. This did not satisfy him for long. In a gesture of defiance, he would escape tedious sermons (he found most if not all the sermons tedious) by “going out into the church porch for a smoke.”(1) One Sunday morning, having attended a particularly strenuous, protracted municipal function, he “entered the organ loft in white tie and tails. He was discreetly dismissed.”(2) Saint-Saëns paid Fauré the double-edged compliment of calling him “a first-class organist when he wanted to be,”(3) and it is fair to suppose that at Rennes he simply did not want to be, that he coasted on his gifts. Back in Paris from 1870, he regularly played the organ at various churches in that city, such labours culminating in a position at the Madeleine, where in 1877 he succeeded Saint-Saëns.

Battleships could almost be floated upon the sea of ink that has been spilt regarding Fauré’s adult religious convictions, or lack thereof. Some, with more optimism than accuracy, have called Fauré an outright pagan. This assumption has been demolished by the world’s greatest living Fauré expert, Jean-Michel Nectoux: “it would … be quite wrong to regard him as an atheist,” even if “at heart … he was a doubter and the resulting mixture of pessimism and resignation set him apart from the ‘despair’ of the Romantics.”(4) Near the end of his life (1922) Fauré wrote in a private letter:

“The universe is order, man is disorder. But is that his fault? He’s been thrown on to this earth, where everything appears to be in harmony, and he walks about on it staggering and stumbling from the day of his birth to the day of his death, weighed down with such a burden of physical and spiritual infirmities (so much so that someone had to invent ‘original sin’ to explain the situation!).”(5) 

Yet at least one of his students, Nadia Boulanger – herself an outstanding teacher in subsequent years – considered him broadly orthodox, albeit his attitude concentrated one-sidedly on the Church’s gentler elements:

"Religion: one could say that he understands it rather in the manner of the most tender episodes in the Gospel according to St John – rather according to St Francis of Assisi than according to St Bernard, or according to Bossuet.”(6)

This is what might be expected from the man who wrote the Requiem, and whose other sacred pieces – such as the Cantique de Jean Racine and the tiny (ten minutes long) Messe Basse, in addition to a dozen motets – recognisably derive from the same soothing hand. In his liturgical output, Fauré almost never raises his voice, and nowhere seeks to frighten listeners with invocations of death.

Small following

Not that he had many listeners until after he reached middle age. When the Requiem (which took him from 887 till 890 to complete) first gained popularity, no-one felt more surprise than Fauré himself. He exulted in a note, dating from October 900, to Colette’s husband Henri Gauthier- Villars (“Willy”): “My Requiem’s being played in Brussels, Nancy, Marseilles and at the Paris Conservatoire. You wait, I’ll soon be a celebrated composer!”(7) Four years before this note, he had been appointed the Conservatoire’s professor of composition. His students included Ravel, the aforementioned Mlle Boulanger, the biographer- composer Charles Koechlin, and the Romanian violinist-composer George Enescu.

Fauré remained, nevertheless, extremely little known to ordinary folk. In a rare but memorable rage, he bawled out his publisher Julien Hamelle: “I am simply unable to tolerate any longer your indifference to the fate of my compositions. I am fifty-one, I am a professor of composition at the Conservatoire, organist at the Madeleine; but you treat me as though I was some student just out of school.”(8) When his pupil Émile Vuillermoz sought admission to SACEM (the French composers’ guild), he asked Fauré to be a sponsor, only to learn that the latter was ineligible for sponsorship. “Fauré, Gabriel? ... We don’t have anyone here with that name,” announced the supercilious SACEM clerk, who went on: “in order to be a sponsor, one must be first a member, and in order to be a member, a composer must receive from his performances a minimum of 200 francs in royalties a month. And, your Gabriel Fauré has never earned such a sum!”(9)

Marital sangfroid

Perhaps serious commercial success on Fauré’s part would have produced greater contentment in his marriage, on which he embarked with astonishing sangfroid. Apparently a match-making salon hostess, Marguerite Baugnies, nominated three unmarried girls: one of whom was Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet (whose statue of Joan of Arc will, incidentally, be known to Melbourne readers: it adorns the State Library’s entrance). Someone wrote down these girls’ names and put them in a hat; Fauré ended up choosing the slip of paper that contained Marie’s name.(10) He wed her in March 1883. Actually he got on much better with Emmanuel Fremiet than with Marie; ill-wishers maintained that Fauré had “married his father-in-law.”(11) Proficient in what later eras would call passive-aggressiveness, Marie would ostentatiously “forget” to do the laundry when Fauré needed clean clothes for a public occasion.(12) He never pretended to view marital fidelity with anything except contempt; in spite or because of his diffident air, which prevented him from conducting orchestras effectively,(13) women found him irresistible.

Elevated to the Conservatoire’s Music directorship in 1905, Fauré manifested beneath his quiet manner a steely resolve. So skilled did he show himself at retrenching superannuated drones, that his son Philippe compared him with Robespierre: “He ordered a head to roll every day.”(14) To one novice, who had won the Prix de Rome (the chief Conservatoire award), Fauré cuttingly observed: “You must be honest now and admit you don’t deserve it.”(15)

Auditory disorders

The rigours of administrative life reduced the leisure he had for his own composing, but a far worse problem also intervened. From 1902 onwards he noticed severe auditory disorders, which impaired pitch perception in the most dreadful ways. He complained that though notes in the middle register (while very faint) at least sounded in tune, “the bass and treble are an incoherent jumble.”(16) At first, somehow, he kept his sufferings a secret from all but a few. Eventually further subterfuge no longer sufficed, and in 920 he reluctantly retired.

During his last illness he told his children: “When I’m gone … Supporters will fall away, maybe … You mustn’t be upset by this. It’s fate, it happened with Saint-Saëns and with other composers … They all go through a period of oblivion … None of that is important. I did what I could … now let God be my judge …!”(17) He died the next day, 4 November 1924. Arts Minister François Albert spoke for most people outside French musical cognoscenti’s ranks when, to the request by these cognoscenti for a state funeral, he responded: “Fauré? Who’s he?”(18)

NOTES .

(1) Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 1845-1924, trans. Leslie Orrey (Dobson, 945), p. 3.

(2) Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991), p. 6.

(3) Nectoux, p. 41 .

(4) Nectoux, p. 111.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Nadia Boulanger, “La Musique Réligieuse”, Revue Musicale, October 1922, pp. 104-111, at p. 107.

(7) Nectoux, p. 119.

(8) Nectoux, pp. 273-274.

(9) Émile Vuillermoz, Gabriel Fauré, trans. Kenneth Schapin (Chilton Book Company, Philadelphia, 969), pp. 14-15.

(10) Nectoux, p. 36. .

(11) Nectoux, p. 38.

(12) Ibid.

(13) “Like many great composers he was an appalling conductor”: Marguerite Long, Au Piano avec Gabriel Fauré (Julliard, Paris, 1963), pp. 91-92.

(14) Vuillermoz, p. 21.

(15) Nectoux, p. 266.

(16) Nectoux, p. 292.

(17) Jessica Duchen, Gabriel Fauré (Phaidon, London, 2000), p. 212.

(18) Ibid.

A selective discography of sacred Fauré

Over the last half-century Fauré’s Requiem seems to have been committed to disc by every second conductor. Most interpretations, and all interpretations dating from before about 1980, use the more elaborate and sensuous rescoring carried out around 900; but latterly the ascetic original version has won favour. (One maestro, Philippe Herreweghe, has recorded both versions.) Some Requiem recordings include no fill-up at all (notably the celebrated 1962 one on EMI which stars two glamorous vocal soloists, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the late Victoria de los Angeles). The majority, however, include at least some other music, often the Cantique de Jean Racine. An all-Fauré collection issued by Collegium Records – with John Rutter conducting – supplies not only the Requiem and the Cantique but four motets and the Messe Basse. Least predictable in its main disc-mate is Daniel Barenboim’s Requiem account (EMI), which, at bargain price by the bye, comes not only with the Fauré Pavane but with no less a masterpiece than the Bach Magnificat in tow. – RJS

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