Musical Moments #25
“Music that gentler on the spirit lies, than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Libera me” from Requiem
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Most composers of Requiems are compelled to write a work in this genre to commemorate a loved one or a specific person; not Gabriel Fauré. He wrote the piece “for the pleasure of it,” and this Requiem setting doesn’t dwell on the fear of judgement but possesses an ethereal arura some have described as a “lullaby for death.”
Fauré, the fifth of six children, didn’t spend a great deal of time with his family as a child. Until age four, he lived with a foster mother while his father was away as director of a teacher’s institute, and at age nine he was sent to a residential school in Paris where he eventually had the good fortune to study organ with Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend.
Fauré was a gifted organist and held organ and choirmaster positions, but his influence was most felt as the director of the Paris Conservatory. The man he succeeded, Theodore Dubois, was forced to retire due to a controversy and his non-progressive mindset. Fauré was the opposite, expanding the curriculum and encouraging all eras of music including allowing students to embrace the music of Debussy. It was his broadminded attitude that influenced the course of modern French music, nurturing the musical style we now refer to as Impressionistic.
The same independence Fauré expressed in his own compositional style was extended to his students such as Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, and George Enesco. The musicologist Henry Prunières wrote, "What Fauré developed among his pupils was taste, harmonic sensibility, the love of pure lines, of unexpected and colorful modulations; but he never gave them [recipes] for composing according to his style and that is why they all sought and found their own paths in many different, and often opposed, directions."
Fauré was also unique in that he was well respected by Romantic Era composers such as Wagner, Liszt and Tchaikovsky, at the same time being admired and be-friended by early 20th century composers Elgar, Albéniz, Richard Strauss, and even Copland. Elgar fondly remembered him as, “such a real gentleman—the highest kind of Frenchman and I admired him greatly.”
Fauré retired from the Conservatory in 1920 at the age of seventy-five but continued to compose and encouraged young composers in the Les Six. His compositional output was extensive—hundreds of songs, volumes of literature for piano, choral works, operas, solo instrumental works, and orchestral pieces—but he never composed any solo music for his own instrument, the organ.
The translation of “Libera me Dómine, de mórte aetérna” is Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal. If you would like the entire “Libera me” text please reference Musical Moments #21 where the complete text to this movement was provided. You might find it interesting to juxtapose Fauré’s treatment of the text which is gentler and more reflective to Verdi’s setting.
Along with Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” and “Pavane” his Requiem is a favorite of singers world-wide. The performance offered today comes from 2018 and features bass-baritone Michael Dean along with the Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra. We hope you enjoy a portion of this timeless masterpiece.
“More profound than Saint-Saëns, more varied than Lalo, more spontaneous than d’Indy, more classical than Debussy, Gabriel Fauré is the master “par excellence” of French music, the perfect mirror of musical genius.” Leslie Orrey in The Musical Times
-John V. Sinclair