Gabriel Fauré

(1845-1924)

Apart from some of his songs, only three works in the distinguished output of Gabriel Fauré could be said to have become popular: his Requiem, Pavane, and the Ballade for piano. Although a pianist who was himself the soloist in the Ballade’s first performance, Fauré wrote only two works for piano and orchestra, the Ballade and the much later Fantaisie (1919). The great French pianist Alfred Cortot commented that Romanticism seemed exclusively to have destined the ballade genre to be the expression of passionate and heady emotions, as in Chopin’s Ballades. Fauré’s work with this title, on the contrary ‘is lapped in a calm atmosphere of controlled emotion and quiet happiness, emphasising an instrumental technique that is deliberately light and pellucid’.

Even the Ballade is more often admired than played, perhaps because its shortness makes it difficult to program, perhaps also because the key of F sharp major is unusual and tricky. In its original form for piano solo, the Ballade was the subject of a famous encounter between Fauré and the aged Liszt at Weimar in 1877. Fauré offered Liszt the music of his Ballade, saying that he feared it was too long. ‘Too long, young man, makes no sense. One writes as one thinks. The great virtuoso then sat down at the piano and began to sight read Fauré’s music. After five or six pages he stopped, said ‘I don’t have fingers anymore’ (or ‘I don’t have any more fingers’), and asked Fauré to continue. This seems to be the true account of what happened, rather than Liszt having said the music was ‘too difficult’. Liszt may have meant that the writing was too much for two hands to realise completely – he certainly suggested that Fauré should turn the Ballade into a work for piano and orchestra, and it is this version which has almost completely eclipsed the solo piano, premiered by the composer with Edouard Colonne conducting in a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1881.

Fauré, who entrusted the orchestration of many of his later works to pupils working under his supervision, scored the Ballade himself, with many delicate touches accentuating a resemblance Fauré acknowledged, saying his work grew from an impression of nature analogous to that inspiring Wagner’s Forest Murmurs from Siegfried. Yet the music could hardly be less Wagnerian in its aesthetic or its pretensions. Rather its feeling of a nature scene, a feeling rather than a description, and its almost vaporous harmonies, make this Ballade a precursor of Debussyan impressionism, and it is no accident that it was conceived at the same time, 1874-78 as Monet and his followers were showing their new visions in painting.

Fauré’s Ballade thus precedes Franck’s Variations Symphoniques (1885), with which it has some features in common. When he was composing it, Fauré described the Ballade to his friend Marie Clerc: ‘it has become a Fantaisie a little outside the normal kind’. He had framed a central Allegro with two movements in moderate tempo ‘so that the three pieces are experienced as one’. Indeed, like Franck’s form, Fauré’s is unconventional. By his own account he saves the real exposition of one of his themes, the third, until it has been stated and substantially modified in the middle Allegro section.

The Ballade begins with a what Fauré authority Jean-Michel Nectoux calls a ‘supple and gracious theme’ stated by the piano. Nectoux believes this is one of the models for the ‘petite phrase de Vinteuil’ in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The theme is picked up by the flute in canon with the piano, then, after a fermata and a phrase for the cellos, the second theme appears, beginning as a descending scale in the relative minor key, but soon developing harmonically adventurous contours. These two themes are developed, until an interlude for flutes and cellos presents the outline of the third theme, circling around the note A flat, and punctuated by wide-ranging piano arpeggios. The same theme, after a growth in animation, takes on an almost martial allure in dotted rhythms, forming the main substance of the central Allegro, and attaining, as Nectoux says, a grandeur which many do not expect of Fauré. A piano cadenza and another fermata mark the end of this section. The third theme then reappears for its ‘real’ exposition, and the finale of the piece. First the theme is shared with flutes and clarinets, an interlude of birdsong and rustling leaves, leading to an extended close of ‘ecstatic murmurs…shimmering exquisitely with sunshine and light, turning the gentle melancholy of the night into the wonder of a spring morning (Cortot).