First published in 2000. Gabriel Urbain Fauré was brn 12 May 1845, in Pamiers in the south of France. Faure’s compositional style has proven difficult to classify. Some music historians consider him a figure of the nineteenth century, a traditionalist, even a neo-romantic; others consider him part of the twentieth century—at the least, a predecessor of modem French music or, at the other extreme, a quiet revolutionary and a great influence upon France’s musical future. This research guide offers a selective, annotated list of writings, biographical information and lists of works and photographs.
The career of Gabriel Fauré as a composer of songs for voice and piano traverses six decades (1862-1921); almost the whole history of French mélodie is contained within these parameters. In this book, the distinguished accompanist and song scholar Graham Johnson places the vocal music within twin contexts: Fauré's own life story, and the parallel lives of his many poets. Each of Fauré's 109 songs receives a separate commentary. Additional chapters for the student singer and serious music-lover discuss interpretation and performance in both aesthetical and practical terms and Richard Stokes provides parallel English translations of the original French texts.
"The Pavane, the Sicilienne and a few other 'lollipops' are all that most people know of Fauré's music, apart from the ever-popular Requiem. But Gabriel Fauré was more than just a 'salon' composer--'the master of charms' Debussy called him--and his powerful wartime and final-period compositions in particular are often misunderstood. Although he lived through one of the most difficult and yet exciting periods for a musician--a period of rapid and often unexpected developments in the arts as a whole--yet he remained true to himself. The inspired professional musician of the nineteenth century developed into a 'classic' in the twentieth. The results of a great deal of research, carried out by the author and others, are included in this, the first major book on Fauré's life and music to appear in English for over thirty years. Dr Orledge comprehensively covers the whole of Fauré's extensive output, and deals in detail for the first time with the composer's manuscripts and notebooks. Copiously illustrated with plates and music-examples, this book will be essential reading for all concerned with the music of an unduly neglected French genius."--Back cover.
Gabriel Fauré’s mélodies offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long career, Fauré composed all but a handful of his songs within six carefully integrated cycles. Fauré moved systematically through his poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the most important cultural issues of the period, Fauré reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The Fauré Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination and insight of Fauré’s musical readings. This book offers not only close readings of Fauré’s musical works but an interdisciplinary study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic currents of French poetry.
The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).
