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CANTIQUE DE JEAN RACINE Gabriel Faure Born May 12, 1845 in Pamiers, Ariège, France Died November 04, 1924 in Paris, France When Gabriel Fauré was a boy, Berlioz had just written La damnation de Faust and Henry David Thoreau was writing Walden. By the time of his death, Stravinsky had written The Rite of Spring and World War I had ended in the devastation of Europe. In this dramatic period in history, Fauré strove to bring together the best of traditional and progressive music and, in the process, created some of the most exquisite works in the French repertoire. He was one of the most advanced figures in French musical circles and influenced a generation of composers world-wide. Fauré was the youngest child of a school headmaster and spent many hours playing the harmonium in the chapel next to his father's school. Fauré's father enrolled the 9-year-old as a boarder at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, where he remained for 11 years, learning church music, organ, piano, harmony, counterpoint, and literature. In 1861, Saint-Saëns joined the school and introduced Fauré and other students to the works of more contemporary composers such as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. Fauré's earliest songs and piano pieces date from this period, just before his graduation in 1865, which he achieved with awards in almost every subject. For the next several years, he took on various organist positions, served for a time in the Imperial Guard, and taught. In 1871 he and his friends -- d'Indy, Lalo, Duparc, and Chabrier -- formed the Société Nationale de Musique, and soon after, Saint-Saëns introduced him to the salon of Pauline Viardot and Parisian musical high society. Fauré wrote his first important chamber works (the Violin Sonata No. 1 and Piano Quartet No. 1), then set out on a series of musical expeditions to meet Liszt and Wagner. Throughout the 1880s, he held various positions and continued to write songs and piano pieces, but felt unsure enough of his compositional talents to attempt anything much larger than incidental music. Fauré's pieces began to show a complexity of musical line and harmony which were to become the hallmarks of his music. He began to develop a highly original approach to tonality, in which modal harmony and altered scales figured largely. The next decade, however, is when Fauré came into his own. He was named composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1896. His music, although considered too advanced by most, gained recognition amongst his musical friends. This was his first truly productive phase, seeing the completion of his Requiem, the Cinq Mélodies, and the Dolly Suite, among other works. Using an economy of expression and boldness of harmony, he built the musical bridge over which his students -- such as Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger -would cross on their journey into the twentieth century. In 1905, he was named director of the conservatory and made several significant reforms. Ironically, this position gave his works more exposure, but it reduced his time for composition and came when he was increasingly bothered by hearing problems. Fauré's works of this period show the last, most sophisticated stages of his writing, streamlined and elegant in form. During World War I, Fauré essentially remained in Paris and had another extremely productive phase, producing, among other things, Le Jardin clos and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, Op. 111, which show a force and violence that make them among the most powerful pieces in French music. In 1920 he retired from the school, and the following year gave up his music critic position with Le Figaro, which he had held since 1903. Between then and his death in 1924, he would produce his great, last works: several chamber works and the song cycle L'horizon chimérique. ~ AMG, All Music Guide Opus 11 andante cantabile quarter note = 80 5 flats – key of Db legato ppp, pp, p, mf, f subito sempre dolce poco rall triplet cresc / crescendo French language IMPRESSIONISM Are concerts meant to simply entertain? OR, might they also educate. It is now time for your music history lesson. Throughout history, people attempt to give definition to everything, to categorize in order to make sense of an undefined world. This is true of historians of art and culture. They attempt to sort thru our cultural world and place all similar sights and sounds of life, specifically art, music, literature, architecture, and cultural events into labeled boxes – usually grouped together by time and assigned a name. However, these categories serve that purpose best if we remember that they are just labels, and, like labels on a box, we can discard the label once we have opened the box and become acquainted with its contents. Our next selection by Gabriel Faure, comes out of a box labeled ROMANTICISM, dated 1820-1900. The box contains straits of art defined by freedom, movement, passion, and the endless pursuit of the unattainable. The box follows its predecessor labeled, CLASSICAL. Classical music was about perfect form, symmetry, and balance. The difference between the two can be visualized terms of a garden. The classical garden: cultivation, formal arrangement vs. the romantic garden: natural, untouched landscape. (The English Garden came about during that same time; a garden designed to give the impression of natural growth, rather than one that was manicured.) Classical – perfect, ideal, a standard to which all else is compared. vs. Romantic – the actual pursuit toward the human ideal. Are you still with me? You can see how easily one can get caught up in defining and categorizing and labeling our chaotic world. Ok, back to Faure. Within the “Romantic’ box exist a group of composers from France that, at the very end of the era…the “Post Romantic Era”, they contrasted romantic emotion and expression with a more simple form called “IMPRESSIONISM.” Impressionism was a very muted subtle form of the dramatic. This French art form explored the simple rather than the complex, the reserved rather than the grand and was less concerned about delivering a message and more about capturing a moment. It’s style is still Romantic because it still captures humanity, but less from the heart and more from the soul. A listener will fail to comprehend this music unless he is sensible to quiet statements, nuance, detail, and an ability to distinguish calmness from dullness, wit from jollity, inspiration from beauty. What captures you more completely, the drama of this painting… or the depiction of a moment in time. They are both Romantic paintings. The French! So now you know why this next song may capture you, or bore you. It is not wrong to have likes and dislikes. It is only wrong to not understand WHY you like or dislike. It is an example of French Impressionism from the Romantic box. Listen for the melody. It weaves in and out thru the song: It exists sometimes in the violin and piano, and sometimes in various voice parts. Sometimes it is complete and sometimes incomplete. Sometimes it is prominent and obvious, but sometimes it fades and is hidden. It is pure and simple “Impressionistic”, rather than dramatic, Romantic. I hope you “HEAR” Gabriel Faure’s “Cantique de Racine”.