Download Gabriel Fauré Suite from Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 80

PROGRAM NOTES
by Phillip Huscher
Gabriel Fauré
Born May 12, 1845, Pamiers, Ariège, France.
Died November 4, 1924, Passy, a suburb of Paris, France.
Suite from Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 80
Fauré composed incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande between May 16 and June 5,
1898, and conducted the first performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on June 21. (The
orchestration was done by Fauré’s student Charles Koechlin, under the composer’s supervision.) Fauré
later made a four-movement concert suite, revising the orchestration in the process. The first performance
of the suite was given on December 1, 1912, in Paris. The suite is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings. Performance time is
approximately nineteen minutes.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Fauré’s Suite from Pelleas
and Melisande were given at Orchestra Hall on November 28 and 29, 1924, with Frederick Stock
conducting.
Claude Debussy was in the audience the night Maurice Maeterlinck’s new play, Pelleas and Melisande,
was premiered in Paris in May 1893, and he quickly secured the musical rights and set to work on his
operatic version. But, as it turned out, Debussy wasn’t the only—or even the first—composer to produce
music inspired by Maeterlinck’s tragedy. In 1898, while Debussy was still struggling to finish his opera,
Gabriel Fauré’s exquisite incidental music to the play enchanted the London theater-going public (and,
shortly after Debussy’s masterpiece finally premiered in 1902, both Schoenberg and Sibelius weighed in
with their interpretations—the first, a tone poem; the latter, another set of incidental music).
Although Fauré’s score was the earliest Pelleas music to hit the stage, Debussy initially was offered the
chance to provide music for the 1898 London production of the play. He had been contacted first, no
doubt because of his “exclusive” rights, with the simple (if not naïve) idea that he merely excerpt
passages from his opera-in-progress. Arguing that his score couldn’t be adapted in that fashion—and
probably offended by the suggestion—Debussy declined, and the London producers quickly moved on to
Fauré, who had become a regular visitor to the city and had something of a following there.
In the spring of 1898, when Fauré was in London again, he met with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the popular
actress who would play Melisande and for whom Maeterlinck’s play was being staged in this new Englishlanguage production. “I had not spoken French since my visits to Paris seventeen years before,” she
recalled in her autobiography, “but I stumbled through somehow, reading those parts of the play to M.
Fauré which to me called for music.” Obviously Fauré was persuaded by the actress’s magnetism, if not
her accent (“how sympathetically he listened,” she recalled), and he began composing almost at once.
Back in France, he worked very quickly (entrusting the details of orchestration to his gifted student,
Charles Koechlin), and when he sent the finished score to London, it was clear that he was the right man
for the job. “His music came,” Mrs. Campbell remembered, “—he had grasped with most tender
inspiration the poetic purity that pervades M. Maeterlinck’s lovely play.” The production was so successful
that it was exported to the United States, complete with Fauré’s music, at the end of the London run.
(Debussy, whose opera was still floundering, 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.”)
From the seventeen numbers in his score, Fauré ultimately chose four to make a suite for the concert hall
(revising Koechlin’s orchestration in the process). They demonstrate Fauré’s unparalleled gift for subtlety
and understatement—a fragile yet surprisingly powerful language of barely contained emotions that’s an
ideal match for Maeterlinck’s style (he called his key works “static dramas”). Little happens in Pelleas and
Melisande. The only action is set in motion by a simple triangle: the helpless, childlike Melisande; Golaud,
who rescues and marries her; and Pelleas, Golaud’s young stepbrother, who falls in love with her. Golaud
eventually kills Pelleas, and Melisande dies in childbirth. The emotions are complex and varied: love,
jealousy, betrayal, heartbreak, and forgiveness coming too late. The character is one of suggestion and
unreality. (Schoenberg later spoke of “the wonderful perfume” of Maeterlinck’s text.)
Fauré’s concert suite begins with the prelude to act 1—delicate, atmospheric music animated by haunting
harmonies and lovely, liquid melodies. (Near the end, just before the curtain rises, we hear Golaud’s
hunting horn in the distance as he wanders through the forest, where he will see Melisande for the first
time.) The prelude to act 3 comes next: this is Melisande at the spinning wheel, and Fauré perfectly
captures her innocence and charm. The famous Sicilienne follows, with its limpid flute solo, perhaps the
quintessential Fauré melody. (Fauré borrowed this music, which he had written five years earlier as a
piece for cello and piano, for the lovers’ big scene at the well, when Melisande accidentally drops her
wedding ring in the water.) The gentle and moving final piece, The Death of Melisande, was played at the
end of Fauré’s funeral, as his coffin was carried from the church.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their
entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to
change without notice.