John Sichel's Program Notes January 6, 2001 Faure's  Piano Quartet No. 2

 
Gabriel Faure (1845-1924): Piano Quartet in g minor, opus 45 (1885-6)

 A. Faure, sometimes called “French Brahms”, referred to by one critic as “the classic example of a rare, virtually priceless wine that simply refuses to travel.”  Both of these assessments, though largely baloney, do contain a grain of truth about this composer and his music, as they hint at the seriousness, restraint and highly personal nature of his work.  Even a scan of his musical output shows these qualities:  by far the lion’s share of his opus numbers are devoted to songs, song cycles and piano miniatures (barcarolles, impromptus, etc.) genres of the most intimate nature.  He wrote one opera, one celebrated choral work (the requiem, which is certainly closer in spirit to the Brahms German Requiem in spirit than it is to the flamboyant and vivid examples of Berlioz or Verdi), a handful of orchestra pieces, including the well-known incidental music to Maurice Materlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande, and about ten important chamber works, including tonights offering.
 Faure was born in 1845, which puts him at the tail end of the second great wave of Romanticism (he was 12 years younger than Brahms, 5 years younger than Tchaikovsky).  Grieg, Dvorak and Rimsky-Korsakov are nearly his contemporaries.  Though his music belongs clearly with that of his contemporaries, he is, perhaps, the most forward looking of his generation, his style strongly forcasting that of the next generation of great French composers, the one usually labeled ‘Impressionist.’
 Something of Faure’s style can be grasped by considering three details of his biography: the first is that his primary musical mentor, though only 10 years older than Faure himself, was Camille Saint-Saens. The second is that, as a teacher, and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he was himself a great influence on a younger generation on French composers which included Debussy (born 1862) and Ravel (1875), the latter of whom was his student.  The third is that, like Cesar Franck and Anton Bruckner, to older Romantics to whom his music bears a certain resemblance, Faure was an organist.
 1)  Like Saint-Saens, he was more or less a prodigy, and was a prodigious virtuoso of the Keyboard-- he once sent his Ballade for piano and orchestra,  to Liszt, who played through most music he received at sight, and never failed to write back with an encouraging (sometimes fulsomely so) assessment.  He sent Faure’s music back with the comment that it was too difficult.  Also like Saint-Saens, he cultivated a technical mastery and facility in areas of harmony and counterpoint quite unusual among French composers.  In the music biz we say ‘great chops.’ (Saint-Saens’ technical facility was such that Berlioz said of him “he is lacking only in inexperience.”)  Faure was Saint-Saens’ equal in technical facility-- and put a much more personal stamp on his works.
 2)  His very personal style, with its emphasis on emotional and pictorial nuance, its pastel colors, and its movement away from classical and romantic dynamism (that is the sense of linear motion, or drive, that powers so much of 18th and 19th century music), was a strong influence on the impressionist generation, Debussy and, particularly, Ravel.  Because he was such an influence, you will hear in his style, pre-echoes of well-known impressionist devices.  To be found in this work, for instance, are augmented chords and the so called ‘French sixth chord,’  whose ambiguity of root and resolution give them a kind of mysterious sound.   Melodies based on these chords suggest the whole-tone scale, another sound associated with French impressionism, and are hinted at in this piece.  Also heard are some suggestions of modal harmony, which undermine the strong sense of dominant and tonic, the harmonic polarity which gives direction to so much classical music.  The perfect authentic cadence, a kind of harmonic exclamation mark which is the most common harmonic pattern in Classical and early Romantic music, is almost totally AWOL in the Faure Quartet.  It occurs twice in the uncharacteristcally vigorous finale, towards the movement’s conclusion, and when it does so it really sticks out:  you realize at this point you have been listening for 35 minutes and are just hearing it for the first time.
 There is also in this music a hint of the kind of delicate picture painting associated both with impressionistic music and impressionistic art, wherein the composer is not telling you about his feelings, per se, but revealing himself by showing you how he looks at another object (as Monet does with his waterlillies, Debussy with his flaxen-haired girl, etc.).  In this piece, in the slow movement, you will hear, in the opening phrase,  Faure’s impression of the bells of the village of Cardirac, where Faure lived as a child.  It recurs several times, but is not developed, or motivically derived, it’s just there.  With its classically forbidden parallel fifths and  repetitive nature, it sounds like pure Debussy.   Likewise the first movement of this work is suggestive of Debussy’s one classically structured work, his opus 10 String Quartet, written about 6 years later and in the same key, while the scherzo, though vigorous (to put it mildly) is suggestive in its melody and use of hemiola of Ravel’s famous quartet.
 The finale of this work, is more traditional in mood and is one of the more outgoing and dynamic movements Faure produced.  It even includes, as mentioned above, its two perfect authentic cadences, and a motive that sounds like it could come out of a Brahms piano quartet-- although that seems thin evidence on which to label this composer a French Brahms.  He was, simply, a French composer with some ties to German romanticism,  with one foot in the 19th century and one in the twentieth-- and a wholly unique and bewitching voice.