Blowing Gabriel's Horn

...It begins with Les Matelots (The Sailors, 1870), and Johnson rightly observes that it is a transitional piece, leading away from Fauré's early romance style toward that of the mélodie, the romance being an earlier, simpler and more schematic form of French song...

...an invitation not to be resisted...

...Here, therefore, a thematic structure is undertaken...

...She kept having to straighten her shoulder straps, as they fell down at every scale that was a little too fast...

...To a hyperbolic love lyric by the usually more marmoreal Parnassian Sully-Prudhomme, we get early Fauré at its best...

...We come now to the song cycle Cinq Mélodies de Venise (Five Venetian Melodies, 1891), inspired by a trip to Venice with the sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer (just divorced from one prince and soon to marry another), a great patroness of the arts...

...In Au Cimetière (Al the Cemetery, 1888), Jean Richepin's touching poem and Fauré's music contrast the peaceful, sweetly mourned deaths of those who are buried on land with the violent, lonely deaths of those lost at sea...

...The true mélodie, to my mind, is for a single voice accompanied by the piano or another instrument...

...For this text, Debussy's version is upbeat...

...Fauré was also remarkable in his rarer song cycles, orchestral works and profuse chamber music...

...To feather-light yet covertly melancholy poems by Paul Verlaine, the music, like the verse, evokes 18th-century dalliance à la Watteau or Fragonard...

...on EMI, Souzay is more emphatic at the climaxes, and even more subdued in the sentimental passages...

...Christopher Maltman sings it sensitively on Hyperion...

...Ameling was 40, not a bad age for a singer, with near perfect French and a mere hint of sameness in her approach...

...While they debated between Bach and Mozart, I proudly put forward Faur...

...There was in Fauré a wonderful duality...

...These are mono recordings expertly remastered, but ever so slightly dated...

...He was briefly affianced to one of her daughters, Marianne, who soon broke the engagement to the as yet obscure and impoverished musician...

...In any case, Hyperion's Au Bord de l'eau is hereby recommended to one and all, even if space does not allow me to address the yet more outstanding latter half of the disc...

...One wishes Dutton had given us more than 16 Fauré items, but must be grateful for what there is...

...Who, in a large output, had never committed a piece of inferior music...

...En Sourdine (Muted) is wistfully languorous (omne post coitum animal triste), with a wrenchingly lovely melody especially ensorcelling in the third stanza...

...Here the triplets in the music convey the movement of both waves and cradles...

...As for the no less exalted Charles Panzéra, Dutton Laboratories has just brought out a CD of his Fauré and Duparc songs (CDBP9749...

...In the booklet for the new issue of the complete songs on Hyperion, whose first CD (66320) is just out, accompanist and annotator Graham Johnson argues for a different order, the early songs being weaker and apt to scare off buyers...

...Here, I read, the composer Gabriel Fauré spent the many last years—I forget the exact number— of his life...

...All good, yet he became something better: Gabriel Faur...

...What changes occur between stanzas are, as so often in Fauré, near imperceptible, but insidiously captivating...

...It is even more postcoital, and should be, like all five songs, sung by a man...

...What other composer, I boldly queried, had such elegance, such good taste...

...As his dates indicate—1845 to 1924— he straddled the previous two centuries, managing to appropriate the best of both...

...Green is about a harried lover seeking rest on his reposing beloved's breast...

...The accompaniment is predominantly in high staccato notes, aptly suggesting the plucked guitar and the leaps of the dancers...

...One of the most amazing recitalists of all time, the Swiss tenor Hugues Cuénod (who made his Metropolitan Opera debut at 85 as the emperor in Turandot, and gave a recital in 2002 at age 100), offers a fine interpretation on the double CD Mélodies (Nimbus 5736/7...

...I don't know why, but I associated the charm of these gestures with the music of Fauré itself...

...Berlioz' version is a dull, gloomy lament as the bereaved fisherman mourns his dead beloved and having to sail by himself...

...In his later years, when he had gone deaf, Fauré occasionally let slip something a bit staid, but still not dull...

...Many singers have recorded Fauré's songs, but until now there was only one complete traversal...

...Jean de Reszke (women had it too): "The voice itself was imbued with a mystery, as was the singing it enveloped in its spell...

...The songs are offered in chronological order, which I consider best...

...It was a magic emanation, an intoxicating essence...

...as Johnson notes, the subliminal ache beneath the surface is audible in Fauré, but not in Debussy's whirlwind setting of the same poem...

...Or, as Robert Orledge puts it in the Bostridge disc booklet, "Fauré took the graceful mélodie of Gounod, converting it into a work of art on a par with the German lieder of Schubert and Schumann in variety and emotional profundity, with the piano becoming an equal partner to the voice...

...Chanson du pêcheur (Song of the Fisherman, 1872) is a Gautier poem also set by Berlioz in his great cycle Les Nuits d'été in 1856, and by Gounod concurrently with Faur...

...only the somewhat greater immediacy of the new recording makes a slight difference...

...On Hyperion, the veteran British soprano Felicity Lott offers a youthfully sparkling rendition...

...The melody is robustly masculine, "powered by undulating triplets [reflecting] the morion of the sea," as Johnson puts it...

...Clearly the new variety of scales that could be employed and the many possibilities arising out of their combination with different keys resulted in an extraordinary expansion of musical language...

...he wrote close to 100 between 1861 and his death...

...The play of fleeting curves that is [its] essence can be compared to the movements of a beautiful woman without either suffering from the comparison...

...Celebrated artist and famed restaurateur looked at me as if I had said Mantovani or, worse yet, spat in their soup...

...On Music Blowing Gabriel's Horn By John Simon IN 19501 was a Fulbright scholar ostensibly studying at the Sorbonne, but actually learning from the City of Paris, which, as Rabelais noted, was a better teacher than its university...

...moreover, this voice was endowed with an amazing agility...

...Composers, Fauré included, expanded some songs into pieces for soloist and orchestra, but that is a whole other ballgame...

...He could easily have become a gossamer Reynaldo Hahn, a solemn Albert Roussel or a nationalistic Vincent d'Indy...

...The drama is intensely affecting, and Souzay gets it across with more pathos than Ainsley, whose light tenor does not grieve as deeply as Souzay's baritone...

...Both these songs were dedicated to the great singer Pauline Viardot, in whose salon the humble bourgeois composer met the dazzling celebrities of the day...

...Les Berceaux (The Cradles, 1879) sets another Sully-Prudhomme poem, about the men who go forth on ships while their women rock the cradles and weep...

...A popular misconception must be promptly laid to rest, namely that Fauré was a miniaturist—superior mostly at dainty piano pieces and fragile art songs...

...Its sound was ethereal and golden at the same time...

...It was almost as lovely as Madame M. Hasselmans herself, who played the piano...

...At times there may be a vocal duet, and occasionally there are a few more instruments, so that the work may just as well count for chamber music...

...It is instructive to compare how some male singers handle this song...

...The nearest thing today comes from the tenor Ian Bostridge...

...This initial CD, comprising the songs involving water, is entitled after one of them Au Bord de l'eau (By the Water's Edge...

...A soprano duet— originally for the two Viardot daughters, Claudie and Marianne—it is sung here by Géraldine McGreevy and Stella Doufexis...

...Souzay was 55 then, only the least bit past his prime, and still a consummate artist...

...Another Richepin setting, less resigned than the foregoing, Larmes (Tears, 1888) vividly suggests an emotional crisis, but does so with an ineffably beautiful, achingly tuneful melody that cuts deep...

...the one opera took five years to complete...

...Many French composers wrote them, but the unquestionable grand masters were Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and—despite a short life that allowed him only a handful—Henri Duparc...

...Although he wrote notable pieces for the theater (Masques et bergamasques, Pelléas et Mélisande, Prométhée, Shylock), he attempted opera only once with Pénélope (1913), a fine but undervalued work...

...Seule...

...Returning from a matinee screening of a famous old movie, I was pensively walking down the cobblestoned Rue des Vignes in the prestigious 16th arrondissement when I noticed a plaque on the wrought-iron gate of a charming garden fronting a demure house...

...listen, for instance, to his Fauré—as well as Debussy and Poulenc—on Mélodies françaises (EMI 57609...

...Tarantelle (1873), text again by Marc Monnier, is a Neapolitan song that has the girl coaxing her boyfriend to join this dance, said to turn partners into lovers...

...Let us, however, recall that Debussy, a great womanizer, was probably jealous: The singer Emma Bardac, his second wife, was Fauré's former mistress...

...Reynaldo Hahn's, conversely, is downright masochistic...

...Interestingly, the semiologist Roland Barthes studied voice with Panzéra, finding in him an ideal...

...I myself would call the sound controlled deliquescence that melts in the singer's mouth and in the listener's ears...

...Recently, as we were returning from a recital by the cellist Janos Starker, I asked Starker and his friend the restaurateur George Lang who their desert island composer would be...

...Barcarolle (1873) is sung on Hyperion by John Mark Ainsley, whose tenor voice gives the song a touch more youthfulness than Souzay's baritone...

...The uneven meter of the poem—hendecasyllabics alternating with tetrasyllables— gives rise to a sort of calm, brief refrain after each soaring longer line, and creates a suggestive duality: sharp observation followed by sedate affirmation...

...There was something the old-time mélodistes could do that has become a lost art...

...In his book On Singers and Singing (1990), the composer Reynaldo Hahn, who was also a singer, tried to describe this special quality with regard to Mme...

...The singer's wife, Magdeleine Panzéra-Baillot, accompanies flawlessly...

...Fauré's strikes the right middle...

...He fulfilled the French promise of a lightness of touch, a twinkle in the eye but nostalgia or melancholy in the heart, and a barely perceptible spice-giving irony...

...My eyes teared up...

...Jennifer Smith on Hyperion conveys the same melancholy as Elly Ameling on EMI...

...The slanting late-afternoon light hugging the cobblestones, and all those years in the same graceful but unassuming abode, overwhelmed me...

...Mandoline is piquantlyjaded...

...To be sure, many cherish Fauré most for his mélodies, the French name for art songs...

...Anyone who has heard, live or recorded, Charles Panzéra, Pierre Bernac, Leopold Simoneau, or Camille Maurane knows what I mean...

...The singers "are comprehensively exercised in a mad moto perpetuo with runs and melismas," as Johnson observes, but I'm not so sure about "the menace of minor key tonality [adding] a glittering erotic undertone...

...As longtime head of the Paris Conservatoire, he had time for serious composing only in the summers...

...Unlike the other famous deaf composer, though, he never inflicted on us an assault similar to the Grosse Fuge...

...We may not enjoy being buffeted back and forth among the three periods Johnson aptly describes as those of "the young salon charmer, the mature master with a tendency to ever deepening musical experiments, and the inscrutable sage whose music remains as challenging as any written in the 20th century...

...And she made the most charming movements whenever she performed this little task...

...NEXT, Au Bord de Teau (1875),thedisc'stitlesong...

...Perhaps the only guardedly negative judgment of Fauré's music comes from an ironic concert review by Debussy: "We heard a Ballade for piano and orchestra by the Master of Charms, Gabriel Faur...

...The vocal range is great, but Maltman and Souzay navigate it effortlessly as the music, in its quiet way, makes a powerful statement...

...A Clymène is a fatalistic capitulation to a dazzling coquette in Fauré's stateliest measures...

...Motifs from Green and En Sourdine (notably that rapturous third stanza) are reprised, and the whole cycle is a hymn to love triumphant, although containing "an unmistakable strand of renunciation.' A comparison to impressionist painting has often been made, centering on what Michel Fleury in his L'Impressionisme et la musique calls the composer's "limpid fluidity...

...Hasselmans was the current one...

...that is better conveyed by the impassioned interlacing of two fastsinging sopranos...

...Especially clever is the final vocalise, where the voices (Doufexis was really a mezzo) at first seem to be competing, then fuse ecstatically...

...In their Les Indispensables du disque compact, Jean-Charles Hoffelé and Piotr Kaminski describe Maurane as "the ideal voice for Fauré, never affected, luminous, narrative, superbly in harmony with Fauréan prosody...

...There is a certain interest in examining the evolution of Fauré's approach to the subject, and, collaterally, the resemblance or difference in the attitudes of the poets whose texts he used...

...Here Maltman's approach is more vehement than Souzay's, though both amply convey the fisherman's sorrow...

...The concluding C'est l'Extase (It is Rapture) is, to quote Johnson, "alive with nervous syncopation and hovering harmony," the opposite of Debussy's version, with its amatory fatigue...

...Fauré's take is equally sad, yet manages to be more melodious, varied, unpredictable...

...Recorded in 1974 by EMI, it was reissued on four CDs in 1991 (7640792)—featuring the distinguished French baritone Gérard Souzay, and the eminent Dutch soprano Elly Ameling, both specialists in art songs...

...Alone, 1871), wherein Gautier laments his solitude in exotic Constantinople, is recast by Fauré for female voice...

...The idea of everything passing save the lovers' love is a bold defiance of fate, quietly corroborated by the melody...

...Les Matelots is composed to a poem by Théophile Gautier, whose five stanzas Fauré boldly reduced to three...

...Dalton Baldwin on piano was one of the finest accompanists of all time, and the sound is more than satisfactory...

...Johnson's attempt to connect it to the story of Hero and Leander seems fanciful Rather, it is about nature seen as a series of griefs and consolations, for which Fauré, for the first time, adopted the minor mode...

...But let us assess the new Hyperion release, sometimes by comparing it with the EMI complete edition, or records of Fauré selections by other singers...

...a trifle mannered, but not unmannerly...

...Jean-Michel Nectoux, the premier Fauré scholar, summarizes the composer's contribution as "an extreme refinement of the Classical tonal system, of which [Fauré] explored every last possibility, regenerated with the very considerable aid of modality...

...Ignorant as I was, Gabriel Fauré was still an aweinspiring name...

...Felicity Lott sings them exquisitely, equaling the celebrated recording by Janet Baker (Hyperion 66320...

...Unfortunately there is a certain monotony in evidence as well, not to mention the problem that will occur in going from the most sophisticated work at the end of each disc to the least sophisticated at the start of the following one...

...nevertheless, with great finesse Fauré intertwines the two voices in a playfully merry number, requiring bravura in both singing and pianism...

...The duet does not make logical sense...

...This song of the happy gondolier by Marc Monnier is full of internal rhymes that Fauré rightly does not emphasize: The gondolier's contentment is as disciplined as, previously, the fisherman's grief was contained...

...Yet the voice is unsurpassably expressive, dramatic as well as lyrical, with incomparable diction...

...If, like me, you prefer male singers here, listen to Hugues Cuénod on the abovementioned Nimbus album, or, even better if you can find it, to Camille Maurane's versions on the six-volume Maurane retrospective (Erato 3391-6...