The finest critical acuity cannot impinge on one s responding to
music. You respond, viscerally, or you do not. And it seems to me
that this must be so even—perhaps especially—when some spiritual
element is involved in one’s subjectivity. I am nevertheless con-
soled by the consensus that Fauré’s Messe de Requiem (1886/8)
is incontestably a masterwork of the genre, because after twenty-
odd years I am unable to decide whether the following insight
into my strong feeling for this music is a matter of sentiment
or sentimentality:
Blessed peace had just returned to the world, at least for a little
while—it was the autumn of 1945, barely weeks after V-J Day—
when I heard the nonpareil Nadia Boulanger conduct a glorious
performance of Fauré’s Requiem at the festival planned by
Harvard University to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of
the composer's birth.
It was an unforgettable experience, so soon after those shatter-
ing years of war, to find oneself sitting in the sequestered stillness
of Memorial Church—that godliest grove of academe, safely
ensconced within Harvard Yard—listening to the most respected
of latter-day French musicians as she officiated in a tender homage
to the most revered French musician of her youth. An additional
other-worldly sense was evoked by her stationing the performers
in the apsidal end of the edifice, well above the level of the
audience, so that the voices virtually floated in the air, as if
disembodied.
Shortly after this, I remember, I encountered an article that
Mlle. Boulanger had written about Fauré’s religious music for
La revue musicale something over two decades earlier (1922).
It seemed to me when I read it for the first time—and it seems to
me now—to be the most touching, the most telling explication of
Fauré’s aesthetic to be found anywhere. It reads in part as follows:
Inner gifts, exceptional ones, determined the career of Gabriel
Fauré—the balance between sensibility and reason has made
its beauty. Marvelously simple, quite without concession, un-
troubled, it has unfolded in well-ordered fashion, affording,
to those who were willing to see and understand, the purest
example of a fine, fecund, and serene life in art. He made no
explicit avowal of a weight of grief, nor even hinted it, and
this reticence is the more cherishable in an age which is too
eager to spread its troubles before the world and divulge its
states of soul. .. His music is inwardly moving; without pose,
vain exclamations, or outcry,it ponders, loves, and suffers.
Then as to Fauré’s musical theology:
In addition to absolving and sustaining us, the Church can
judge and condemn. That side of it the master has never
expressed, beyond bare textual obligations. He seems to have
conceived religion rather in the manner of St. John or St.
Francis of Assisi than St. Bernard or Bossuet. He looks for and
finds in it a source of love’and not of fear. This must be accepted
if he is to be understood. The religious voice of the musician
seems to interpose between Heaven and mankind: generally
peaceful, quiet, and fervent, it is grave at times, and sorrowful.
Menacing or dramatic—never. Liberated from an excess which
would be inappropriate and undesired, it moves with devotion
and tenderness in a demure quiet, as if incense-laden. Almost
impersonal, it reaches the point of being no more than a living
part of the Church...
For present purposes this further passage is inescapable. Mlle.
Boulanger has it that the Requiem “is not only one of the greatest
works of Gabriel Fauré, but also one of those which do most
honor to music and thought. Nothing has been written which is
purer, clearer in definition. I shall be forgiven for refraining from
an analysis which must pause before every measure if an attempt
were made to capture all its points; moreover, this Mass for the
Dead, so especially conceived, carries with it a feeling of its own
which renders technical terms futile. Certainly his musical web,
his architecture, his reason and order, are the essential causes of
his sovereign beauty, as one could demonstrate with a joy, a
pride, and a respect for all the minutiae of his workmanship.
But it is where these attributes end, admirable as they are, that
the real Requiem begins.”
And finally:
No exterior effect alters its sober and rather severe expres-
sion of grief, no restlessness troubles its deep meditation, no
doubt stains its spotless faith, its gentle confidence, its tender
a Charlin recording, Paris
production supervisor TERESA STERNE
cover art FREDERICK MARVIN cover design WILLIAM S. HARVEY
NONESUCH RECORDS, 15 Columbus Circle, New
por.
H-1158 (mono) H-71158 (stereo)
and tranquil expectancy . . . Everything is usual; but with an
alteration, a passing note, some special inflection of which he
has the secret, Gabriel Fauré gives a new and inimitable char-
acter to all that he touches . . . If anything could truly mitigate
for us the thought of death, it would be the image of hope,
of serenity, which he has made for us.
If “the real Requiem begins only at the boundary of the
annotative domain, as Mlle. Boulanger insists (and who is to say
her nay?), then the listener needs no more than the appended
text and the Requiem itself, herewith recorded. This notwith-
standing, a modicum of historical perspective hardly would be
out of order.
Fauré indeed became, as intimated, a gray eminence in French
musical life. But this recognition did not come until late in
his life—in those twilight years that brought him the directorship
of the Conservatoire, a seat in the Institut, and the palm of the
Légion d'honneur. And even at the height of his fame Fauré’s
music was not so well known in the most sophisticated purlieus
as it is known everywhere today. The reasons for this are, in
retrospect, rich in irony.
Consider. When one speaks of French music’ in the late-
middle nineteenth century one means perforce opera, and not
necessarily French opera because the reigning deities were Meyer-
beer and Rossini. The concert halls did not figure controllingly
on the Parisian musical scene. It was the Franco-Prussian War
that unloosed what was to become the most determinedly nation-
alistic of modern tonal traditions, That abortive conflict over
Alsace-Lorraine dealt a quietus to the ever fragile finances of the
French lyric stage. All at once the concert halls started thriving,
and all at once French composers started composing non-operatic
works to meet the demand. The late Edward Burlingame Hill was
inclined to attribute the progressive trend of French music from
that time forward entirely to the “permanent” conversion of
public tastes. This strikes me as an inadequate (though properly
Francophilic) estimate of the situation, for it does not credit the
shakers and the movers. Chief among these was Fauré, who
seems to have been veritably a vanguard unto himself. The only
trouble was that he promoted every talent in France except
his own.
At age twenty-six he was a charter committeeman of the
Société nationale, and deeply committed to the aims set forth
in its manifesto: “To encourage and bring to light, as far as lies
within its power, all musical attempts, whatever their form, on
condition that they give evidence of lofty artistic aspirations . . .”
But even then (1871) he must have suspected that the pre-
dominance of conservatives in this body augured ill for its high
resolves. Nor did he hesitate to encourage the formation of a
rival group when he felt the time had come. This was the Société
musicale indépendante—the acknowledged incubator of French
modernism—and the first president of this profoundly influential
seccessionist organization was, naturally, Fauré.
It is amusing to note that, for all his tenacious opposition to
the Establishment, the self-effacing Fauré by 1905 was regarded
as mossback enough to head the Conservatoire. He was to hold
this post until 1920, by which time no one had to worry about
the rights and privileges of the avant-garde.
Tt was not as a composer, then, that Fauré knew fame. His
works were often performed, after 1905 in particular, but rarely
received with more than polite approval. His contemporaries
never could accept him at his true value as a creative artist. They
honored him rather for his fighting the good fight in behalf of
others. Very few recognized that this lifelong fonctionnaire had
been a composer of subtly individual gifts from the beginning.
Aaron Copland, undaunted by the ineffable, sums up this
subtlety thus: “Fauré belongs with that small company of musical
masters who knew how to extract an original essence from the
most ordinary musical materials. To the superficial listener he
probably sounds superficial. But those aware of musical refine-
ments cannot help but admire the transparent texture, the clarity
of thought, the well-shaped proportions. Together they constitute
a kind of Fauré magic which is difficult to analyze but lovely to
hear...” Yes.
Notes by JAMES LYONS
Editor, The American Record Guide
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿