Mu sic
Fulfilling every desire
Robin Holloway
Ahundred and fifty years ago — May 12 1845 — Gabriel Faure, the supreme composer of felicity, was born. Gentle, pol- ished, radiant, elegant, tasteful — the adjectives come tripping off the pen. They are all appropriate — as is also his rarely heard middle name Urbain for this demure yet subtly sensuous darling of Paris and London high society during the years of entente cordiale. Yet they imply some reser- vation, even a slur, which lovers of his music would like to see removed.
It is true that he stands to the side of his time, the headiest in the whole of music. Mahler bared his inner life for all to behold, Strauss stripped Salome of her veils and exposed Klytemnestra's evil dreams, Schoenberg penetrated the unhinged unconscious, Scriabin flooded the senses with perfumed ecstasy. The most famous of Faure's compatriots were producing scores of atmospheric evocation and hedonistic shimmer — Debussy's orchestral triptyches, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe — whose sensitivity to colour is unlikely ever to be surpassed. Then came the two hammer blows from the young Stravinsky, Petrushka with its mechanized animation and The Rite of Spring with its mechanized violence.
From all this Faure remains aloof. He eschews the fin de siecle's principal medi- um, the enormous orchestra. Though both his stage works treat heroic classical sub- jects (extensive incidental music for an open-air Prometheus, and an opera on the return of Ulysses to his faithful Penelope) they are powerful by restaint rather than physical force. His only other sizeable work the Requiem (still his best-known in Eng- land, where it has slipped unobtrusively into honorary Anglican citizenship) down- plays, like the genteel prelate in Pope who `never mentions hell to ears polite', the fire and brimstone, fear and contrition, in favour of sweetness and solace. Its conclud- ing in Paradisum seems to pervade the work from the start.
But the bulk of his 120-odd compositions consists of songs with piano; several series of solo piano works with unrevealing genre-titles like nocturne, barcarolle, valse- caprice, prelude; and chamber music sonatas quartets quintets and a trio with piano, and a solitary string quartet. These ten works pursue purely musical ends over the course of a long lifetime (the first violin sonata dates from 1876, the string quartet, his last work, form 1924, the year of his death) so unruffled by events from the outer world or within the art itself as to seem, to the unsympathetic, not merely detached so much as frigid.
In a time which favours thrills, extrava- gance, slogans, revelations, explicit radical- ism, and general sound and fury, the still small voice can hardly be heard; and if it can, doesn't appear to be saying anything big enough to be worth repeating. Yet the benefits of moderation can be appreciated. Debussy's Pelleas with its famous reduction of the love-duct from a bawl to a whisper, once seemed destined to be for ever peripheral and special. Now it is almost popular. Debussy is of course part of his epoch's hedonism which accords so well with contemporary taste - Mucha and Monet, Redon and Klimt. Fault's unmis- 'I was hoping we could be more than just good learned friends, my dear.' takable voluptuousness is by comparison frugal and severe.
Perhaps his best hope lies in his songs. Everyone who loves songs loves apres un rove even when it's sung on a cello, a horn, a saxophone. This early flower blooms with mature lustre in two wonderful Verlaine cycles of around 1890 - La bonne chanson, telling of courtship, love and marriage with a very un-Schumanian happy ending; and the cinq poemes de Venise, a group linked by mood and motif rather than narrative. In both, Faure's prime-of-life richness is perfect as a ripe peach. Later cycles carry pellucid economy so far towards austerity as to give hostages to the ill-disposed. And broadly speaking this is the trajectory of the piano-oeuvre too.
But the late harvest of chamber music runs no risk of etiolation. In his 70s Faure seemed to grow fresher and stronger; the sacred fount bubbles spring-like, and the water is distilled into complete purity. This handful of late works makes an interesting comparison with the exactly contemporary chamber-music of Elgar. By 1918 they even looked similar - stoutish old men with white moustaches, survivors from a van- ished epoch. But Elgar, though younger by twelve years, is broken in heart and spirit; the older composer remains inwardly youthful and capable of self-renewal. Though apparently recrudescent, Elgar's three chamber works are a last gasp. Pas- sages of deep inward beauty exist, and are milked very hard. But the working-out is conventional, routine, and stuffed with padding. And this great master of the sym- phony orchestra is ill-at-ease with slender forces; he lays it on so thick that one wants to call for the strippers.
Whereas Faure, who scarcely touched an orchestra in all his life, can produce with- out strain, from his habit of abstemiousness with concomitant attention to clarity and balance, a complete range of sonority from his 2, 3, 4 or 5 players. Moreover Elgar's works seem still to be trying to make public clamour, for all the turn towards medita- tion and elegy. Faure, unaccustomed as he is to public speaking, is experienced in the art of understatement. He fills some sur- prisingly large dimensions (the 2nd violin sonata lasts 25 minutes, the 2nd quintet half an hour) with meditative utterance all the more eloquent for its lack of bombast. Nor does he lack variety; the scherzos sparkle, and the finales can accumulate a calmly gigantic power. This music appears to drift and ripple effortlessly past. In fact its inner tensility and subterranean fire demand concentrat- ed attention. They also induce it yet the collaboration has a most unusual nature. One listens in a kind of trance; the effort has been all the composer's; the listener absorbs the result as something dreamlike in its ease. One is drained by an experience so consummating, yet also replenished and refreshed. Rarely in all music is the appetite so exactly satisfied.
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