Program Notes

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande (1898)

Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings

“The effect of this music would seem to me to be limited to this performance, and while being guilty of considerable vanity in the matter, it would seem to me impossible

for there to be any cause for confusion, when that would only be as a matter of weight. Fauré is the mouthpiece of a group of snobs and fools who will never see anything in nor have anything to do with the other Pelléas .”

Maurice Maeterlinck's surrealist play Pelléas et Mélisande , with incidental music by Gabriel Fauré, was enjoying a successful run. But Claude Debussy's letter to his publisher in 1898 made clear that battle lines had been drawn. Debussy was currently at work on an opera based on the same play, and, perhaps suffering from more angst than he realized, he had condemned Fauré's music without having heard it.

To the younger men like Debussy, Ravel and Satie, Fauré represented a backward look at French music that was out of step with the progressive movement led by Debussy. Though the new generation of French composers was making a name for itself, Fauré continued to hold his own with the public, and tensions were high.

It is not difficult to understand the scorn felt at Fauré's perceived “Old School” style. His music tended toward restraint, delicacy, and romanticism, and he rarely orchestrated his own scores; but he doesn't deserve to be dismissed so easily. He was a skilled pianist, writing numerous works of great delicacy and elegance; he was a master of the song-cycle with a profound understanding of and feel for words; and his chamber music stands as some of the most intimately beautiful and intensely penetrating ever written. His harmonic and melodic gifts were considerable. He had an innate ability to create interesting and adventurous harmonic excursions, without straying very far from the established structures of tonal music and it seems almost as though the melody grew naturally from the harmonic language rather than the other way around. All of these things give his works a strength and emotional appeal that almost take the listener by surprise.

It is precisely this kind of appeal that kept Fauré before the public in his later years, and exactly what made his incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande so successful in 1898. The music had been written out in piano score and then handed off to his pupil Charles Koechlin who undertook the orchestration. The playwright Maeterlinck was delighted with the music.

In 1901, Fauré undertook to assemble a suite taken from the complete score, which consisted of the Prelude , Spinning Song and The Death of Mélisande . Later, in 1909, with the success of the suite and ever-growing fame, the composer decided to add the Sicilienne , which had actually begun life as a piece for cello and piano. Fauré also took the opportunity to re-orchestrate some of the music, expanding and elaborating on Koechlin's characteristically subtle touch.

The heart-rending Prelude accompanies a scene where Melisande is lost in the forest, seized by an uncontrollable yearning. The music is both deeply passionate and intensely beautiful, and we feel all of the longing and desire of her heart in passages that swell to grand proportions and then sink back into quiet melancholy.

The Spinning Song is music heard just before the scene in which Pelléas and Mélisande first declare their love for each other, Romeo and Juliet style, Mélisande standing at her bedroom window and Pelléas standing below. The music is a tender dialogue with oboe and alternating wind soloists over a swirling string accompaniment representing the two lovers.

In the Sicilienne , a solo flute gently sings a soothing pastoral song over a harp accompaniment. The strings soon pick up the music in a more passionate plea. It is perfectly placed within the framework of the play to give a few moments of repose before the tragedy fully unfolds before us.

The final movement is a funeral march ruing the death of Mélisande , beginning quietly, but soon building to a cry of anguish. Throughout the music is unyielding in its bitter sadness and grief-laden tragedy.

In the end, Rosenberg needn't have bothered. The opera didn't go over well lasting just nine performances in Vienna before being supplanted by Soler's Una cosa rara . It must have been a bitter blow to Mozart and Da Ponte, who both recognized that the work was something special. However, in December of the same year, Figaro was produced in Prague. The Bohemians must just have had a better sense of humor than the Viennese, because right from the start the opera was a smash hit. By the time Mozart arrived there right after the premier, he heard his opera's music sung and whistled in the streets, and being talked of everywhere he went.

The opera's overture, frequently making appearances in someone's concert season from a world class orchestra to a high school band, is a sparkling little gem of musical perfection. Here high comedy and light-hearted fun go hand-in-hand, and the only complaint is that it's so darn short. The strings and bassoons quietly sound out a comic monologue, continued by the winds. And when the whole orchestra suddenly belts out the punchline, it's obvious how much we're going to enjoy this. The humorous exchange continues throughout with Mozart gradually adding layer upon layer, here adding a touch of pathos, there a dash of anticipation and now a stern finger wagging. But in the end, nothing matters but the overwhelming joy and zest for life that finally brings the overture to a sublimely blissful conclusion. Look around the audience during this performance. You'll probably be hard-pressed to find someone who isn't smiling.