At the age of 76 Fauré composed his final essay in the subtle art of lieder mélodie writing. The work was a cycle of just four poems, entitled L’horizon chimérique (translations here). He chose to set the work of a poet – Jean de La Ville de Mirmont – who, like so many young men of […]
Can you think of a famous late nineteenth/early twentieth century French piano sonata? If you drew a blank, don’t worry, it’s not all that surprising – the list of composers who didn’t write one reads like a Who’s-Who of French music of the fin de siècle: Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Chabrier, Fauré, Chausson, Debussy, Satie, Ravel […]
There are certain poems that attract composers like bees to flowers; one such is Paul Verlaine’s La lune blanche. A quick song tally arrived at a total of at least 137(!) different settings of the poem, and that’s just in the original French – there were lots more that had been set in translation. Here […]
Solo piano music forms a large part of Fauré’s output. And, while there are pieces with such titles as ‘impromptu’ and ‘valse-caprice’, the greatest body of work (26 opuses in all) is collected together under two headings: Nocturnes and Barcarolles. The initial stimulus for these is clearly derived from Chopin, as is the musical style […]
André Caplet’s Conte Fantastique for harp and string quartet is an example of a francophone fascination with the writings of Edgar Allen Poe that started during during the latter part of the nineteenth century – indeed it’s been argued that Poe, at this time, was better known in France than in his native America. This […]
St. Stephen’s Cathedral – the heart of Vienna: here Haydn was a chorister and later got married; here, too, Mozart married his Constanze and later christened his children; Johann Strauss the younger was also married here, while the cathedral’s register of deaths contains many illustrious musical names including those of Vivaldi and Schubert. The importance of […]
