However, in that year Saint-Saëns joined the staff, bringing with him a breath of modernist air nourished on such dangerous influences as Liszt and Wagner, and he and Fauré became lifelong friends. By 1861 he had been a pupil for seven years at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris which set out primarily to train church musicians. Therefore recording is an ideal medium for it, free of all the material distractions of dress, gesture or facial exercise.įauré’s preference for suggestion and nuance may seem to sit uneasily with his choice of Victor Hugo as the poet for his six earliest songs (one thinks of André Gide’s famous reply to the question of who was France’s greatest poet: ‘Victor Hugo, hélas!’), but the composer, even at the age of sixteen, was careful over what he set. In this respect, if in no other, his music resembles that of Erik Satie: it tends to speaks to each of us singly in familiar tones.
Where Duparc embraces the grand gesture, Fauré for the most part prefers the suggestion, the nuance. Henri Duparc was a close friend, but his songs, dubbed by Fauré’s pupil Ravel ‘imperfect works of genius’, had only a passing impact on Fauré’s own. But many elements remained unchanged: among them, a distaste for pretentious pianism (‘Oh pianists, pianists, pianists, when will you consent to hold back your implacable virtuosity!!!!’ he wrote, to a pianist, in 1919) and a loving care for prosody-not infrequently he ‘improved’ on the poet for musical reasons. In sixty years of songwriting, between 18, Fauré’s craft understandably developed in richness and subtlety.
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