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Three Versions of Classic: The Construction of Gabriel Fauré in the 1920s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2021
Abstract
Drawing on recent scholarship (Kelly, Pasler, Wheeldon, Fauser) examining the discursive construction of the reputations of well-known Belle-Époque musicians, this article investigates the case of Gabriel Fauré and the ways in which his posthumous legacy was shaped throughout the 1920s in France. Drawing on wide-ranging journalistic and biographical sources, the article argues that the figure of Fauré was increasingly constructed around the concept of the ‘classic’ in the years immediately following his death in 1924. I suggest that the types of ‘classicism’ associated with Fauré in this context were, however, multivalent and largely contingent on the cultural and aesthetic mandates of those ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ that sought to advocate in favour of his posthumous legacy. This article thus examines the notion of Fauré ‘the classic’ as it was discursively constructed in three specific instances: by the French Republic in its State funeral for the composer; by the young post-war generation of composers (especially Georges Auric of the group Les Six), and by the composer, former student, and biographer of Fauré, Charles Koechlin. These cases reveal that Fauré's classicism was articulated in contrasting ways, ranging from a heroic classicism associated with the celebration of national ‘great men’, an aesthetic classicism linked to French musical traditions, or, finally, a classicism derived from the aesthetics and culture of Ancient Greece.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: French Criticism , August 2022 , pp. 273 - 289
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Gabriel Fauré quoted by Georges Auric, ‘L'Hommage de la musique à ceux qui ne sont plus’, Lettres françaises (11 November 1944) in Georges Auric, Écrits sur la musique de Georges Auric/Writings on Music by Georges Auric, ed. Carl B. Schmidt (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2009): vol. 2, 361.
2 See Barbara Kelly and Christopher Moore, eds, Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018); Wheeldon, Marianne, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Kelly, Barbara, ‘Remembering Debussy in Interwar France: Authority, Musicology, and Legacy’, Music & Letters 93 (2012): 374–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pasler, Jann, ‘Deconstructing d'Indy, or the Problem of a Composer's Reputation’, 19th–Century Music 30/3 (2007): 230–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fauser, Annegret, ‘Creating Madame Landowska’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 10 (2006): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Here, I am drawing on the concept of ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ as proposed by Marianne Wheeldon in ‘Debussy's “Reputational Entrepreneurs”: Vuillermoz, Koechlin, Laloy and Vallas’, in Kelly and Moore, eds, Music Criticism in France, especially 227–30. Wheeldon borrows the term ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ from sociologist Gary Fine. See Fine, Gary Alan, ‘Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding’, The American Journal of Sociology 101/5 (1996): 1159–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Roger Valbelle, ‘La plaque de grand-croix de la légion d'honneur à M. Gabriel Fauré’, Excelsior, 2 February 1923; see also Le Figaro, 2 February 1923.
5 Nectoux, Jean-Michel, Gabriel Fauré: Les voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Fayard, 2008): 604Google Scholar.
6 Caballero, Carlo, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 9Google Scholar.
7 René Dumesnil, Portraits de musiciens français (Paris: Éditions d'histoire et d'Art, 1938): 79.
8 Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 27.
9 Louis Aubert to Guitard, Louis, ‘Entretien avec Louis Aubert’, La Table ronde 165 (1961): 145Google Scholar, cited in Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, p. 9.
10 Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 10.
11 I will not be evaluating Fauré's works nor those of his emulators in search of ‘classical’ characteristics, however defined. What concerns me here is the discourse around these works and the manner it is used to position Fauré in a specific way.
12 Paul le Flem, ‘L'hommage de la Nation à Gabriel Fauré’, Comoedia, 22 June 1922.
13 Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 547–9.
14 Th. Lindenlaub, ‘Musique française et goûts étrangers’, Le Temps, 14 June 1922.
15 Paul le Flem, ‘L'hommage de la Nation à Gabriel Fauré’, Comoedia, 22 June 1922.
16 Th. Lindenlaub, ‘L'hommage à Gabriel Fauré’, Le Temps, 22 June 1922.
17 François Crucy, ‘Un hommage triomphal: Gabriel Fauré fêté à la Sorbonne’, Le Petit Parisien, 21 June 1922.
18 Georges Chennevière, ‘La Musique: Hommage à Gabriel Fauré’, L'Humanité, 22 June 1922: ‘Sans bruit, sans réclame, sans autre recommandation que celle de son œuvre, tranquillement, discrètement, Fauré est entré dans la gloire.’ Nectoux reports that the ceremony brought in 120,000 francs for Fauré whose pension from the Conservatoire (from which he retired in 1920) amounted to a little over 20,000 francs per year. See Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 546–8.
19 See Roland-Manuel's article, ‘Gabriel Fauré’, L’Éclair, 19 June 1922.
20 Paul Le Flem, ‘L'hommage de la Nation à Gabriel Fauré’, Comoedia, 22 June 1922; ‘Ne donnons pas à ce geste une signification trop étroite et gardons-nous de mésestimer ce grand amoureux du rêve et de la vie en ne justifiant notre affection que par des raisons de convenance nationale. Ce serait là singulièrement méconnaître la qualité et l'universalité d'un art que Fauré créa pour enchanter les hommes, détourner ceux-ci de la laideur de bien des choses et adoucir leurs amertumes.’
21 Georges Chennevière, ‘La Musique: Hommage à Gabriel Fauré’, L'Humanité, 22 June 1922; Reynaldo Hahn, ‘Gabriel Fauré’, Comoedia, 15 June 1922.
22 Cf. Paul Souday, ‘Hommage national à Gabriel Fauré’, Paris-Midi, 21 June 1922.
23 Gabriel Fauré, Lettres intimes, p. 270; cited in Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 548: ‘… le développement de ma réputation – qui me laisse, moi, absolument froid …’.
24 See La Revue musicale, October 1922. This special issue, an initiative of the journal's editor-in-chief, Henry Prunières, featured various articles on the composer and his music and featured seven piano pieces composed on the name of Gabriel Fauré by Maurice Ravel, Georges Enesco, Louis Aubert, Florent Schmitt, Charles Koechlin, Paul Ladmirault and Jean Roger-Ducasse.
25 Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 550.
26 For details, see Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 550–55.
27 Avner Ben-Amos, ‘The Sacred Center of Power: Paris and Republican State Funerals’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22/1 (1991): 27–48; here 41.
28 In 1923 there were five State funerals, more than in any other year since the beginning of the Third Republic (Théophile Delcassé, Michel Joseph Maunoury, Pierre Loti, Charles de Freycinet, Maurice Barrès). For a complete list, see Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 392.
29 Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 86–9.
30 Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Plon, 1949), 33. Cited in Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 604.
31 Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 250–51.
32 Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 604.
33 See Carlo Caballero, ‘Fauré's Religion and La Chanson d’Ève’, in Regarding Fauré, ed. Tom Gordon (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999): 333–68.
34 On the creation of the historical concept of the ‘Belle Époque’ during the interwar period and beyond, see Dominique Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la Belle Époque (Paris: Fayard, 2017). Elsewhere, Kalifa refers to the ‘Belle Époque’ as a ‘chrononym, constructed after the fact so as to cry “the world that we have lost”’. Kalifa, ‘« Belle Époque »: invention et usages d'un chrononyme’, Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle (June 2016): 119–32.
35 ‘Discours de François Albert’, cited in ‘Les funérailles de Gabriel Fauré’, Le Temps, 9 November 1924.
36 ‘Discours de François Albert’ cited in ‘Les funérailles de Gabriel Fauré’: ‘Comme un bon ouvrier ne quitte jamais son labeur que pour prendre le repos de la nuit, Fauré ne s'est endormi de l’éternel sommeil qu'après avoir accompli sa tâche toute entière.’
37 ‘Discours de François Albert’, cited in ‘Les funérailles de Gabriel Fauré’.
38 G. Davenay, ‘Les obsèques nationales de Gabriel Fauré’, Le Figaro (9 November 1924).
39 Davenay, ‘Les obsèques nationales de Gabriel Fauré’.
40 Alfred Bruneau, La Vie et les œuvres de Gabriel Fauré: notice lue par l'auteur à l'Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1925): 30–1. Cited in Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, p. 88, see n17 (p. 347).
41 Francis Poulenc, ‘Accent Populaire’, Le Coq Parisien 4 (November 1920).
42 On ‘ultramodernism’ see Barbara L. Kelly, Music and Ultramodernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1919–1939 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013): 4–8.
43 On Les Six's rejection of Debussyism and its impact on their work and the development of ‘neoclassicism’, see Marianne Wheeldon, ‘Anti-Debussyism and the Formation of French Neoclassicism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 70/2 (2017): 433–74.
44 Henri Collet, ‘Un grand musicien: Gabriel Fauré ou le génie classique’, La Dépêche (20 October 1923).
45 Collet, ‘Un grand musicien’.
46 See Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
47 Collet, ‘Un grand musicien’.
48 This comparison was developed in the biography of Fauré by his son, Philippe Fauré-Fremiet, in Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Rieder, 1929), and reinforced around the idea of the two composer's shared hearing ailments. This aspect of the biography was frequently referenced in reviews of Fauré-Fremiet's biography in the press. In his review for Comoedia, Gustave Fréjaville quoted the following passage: ‘The long desperation of Beethoven, the agony of Schumann were also his own. Only, he never spoke about it with those who were close to him … He never heard Pénélope … little by little as his deafness isolated him from the world, he penetrated more deeply into this musical universe where the ear only perceives forms of which the spirit alone understands the meaning. Like Beethoven, the deaf Gabriel Fauré never stopped improving.’ Gustave Fréjaville, ‘Gabriel Fauré by Ph. Fauré-Fremiet’, Comoedia 21 July 1929.
49 Eveline Hurard-Viltard, Le Groupe des Six ou le matin d'un jour de fête (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988): 130.
50 Georges Auric, ‘La Musique: Autour de Gabriel Fauré’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 3 December 1922 in Georges Auric, Écrits sur la musique de Georges Auric/Writings on Music by Georges Auric, ed. Carl B. Schmidt (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2009): vol. 3, 1011–14.
51 Georges Auric to Paul Collaer (21 December 1922) in Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée (Liège: Mardaga, 1996): 119.
52 Georges Auric to Paul Collaer (21 December 1922) in Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, 119.
53 Georges Auric, ‘La Musique: Autour de Gabriel Fauré’, 1012.
54 Auric, ‘La Musique’, 1170.
55 Auric, ‘La Musique’, 1171.
56 André Cœuroy, La musique française moderne (Paris: Delagrave, 1922), 17: ‘tous nos musiciens, sous leurs aspects les plus divers et, au regard des côteries, les plus opposés, travaillent à l'idéal si heureusement défini par Gabriel Fauré: Le goût de la clarté dans la pensée, de la sobriété et de la pureté dans la forme.’
57 Henri Collet, ‘Un livre de Rimsky et un livre de Cocteau – Les cinq russes, les six français et Erik Satie’, Comoedia, 16 January 1920.
58 Darius Milhaud, ‘Il y a dix ans mourait Gabriel Fauré’, Le Jour, 9 November 1934.
59 Arthur Honegger, ‘À l'Opéra: Pénélope un chef d’œuvre’, Comoedia, 20 March 1943. The two composers had met in August 1923 in Annecy-le-Vieux at the summer house of Fernand Maillot at which time excerpts of Fauré's Requiem and Honegger's Le Roi David were performed. See Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 559.
60 Letter from Francis Poulenc to Gabriel Faure (11 June 1952) in Francis Poulenc, Correspondance 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994): 730.
61 See Francis Poulenc, ‘Alexis Emmanuel Chabrier: Notes de Francis Poulenc’, in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. 1 (Milan: Ricordi, 1963): 307, reprinted in Francis Poulenc, J’écris ce qui me chante, ed. Nicholas Southon (Paris: Fayard, 2011): 365–7.
62 André Gide, ‘Classicism’, The Virginia Quarterly Review 5/3 (1929): 321–4, here 323.
63 Adolphe Boschot, cited in ‘Les funérailles de Gabriel Fauré’.
64 Julien Tiersot, Un demi-siècle de musique française, 1870–1919 (Paris: Alcan, 1924): 171; Florent Schmitt, ‘Les concerts’, Le Temps, 21 November 1931, 3.
65 Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Alcan, 1927).
66 Koechlin orchestrated Fauré's orchestral suite derived from his incidental music for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande.
67 Philippe Cathé, ‘Charles Koechlin: The Figure of the Expert’, in Kelly and Moore, eds, Music Criticism in France, 63–90. An article published by Koechlin in Comoedia (5 September 1927) contains an anonymous preface commenting on Koechlin's biography: ‘If some of Fauré's most faithful friends contest certain dates that were derived from the opus numbers of works when in fact the conceptual and creative work did not always follow that order, all of them are unanimous in acknowledging the value of this book for its penetrating analysis of Fauré's genius and the ideas that it inspired.’ See Charles Koechlin, ‘La vie et l'oeuvre d'un artiste’, Comoedia, 5 September 1927.
68 Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 7.
69 Charles Koechlin, Debussy (Paris: Henri Laurens, Éditeur, 1927). On Koechlin's biography of Debussy see Marianne Wheeldon, ‘Debussy's “Reputational Entrepreneurs”: Vuillermoz, Koechlin, Laloy and Vallas’, in Kelly and Moore, eds, Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939, especially 227–30.
70 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 125: ‘Elle est de charme et de force.’
71 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 125.
72 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 126.
73 Christopher Moore, ‘Regionalist Frictions in the Bullring: Lyric Theater in Béziers at the Fin de Siècle’, 19th Century Music 37/3 (2014): 211–41.
74 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 130.
75 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 24.
76 Charles Koechlin, ‘Le Théâtre’, La Revue musicale, October 1922, 37 (full article p. 34–49).
77 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 24–5: ‘Il influe sur le reste de sa carrière et favorise dès lors une simplification presque dépouillée, réduite à l'essentiel; des thèmes d'une pureté dorique et pour tout dire, cette résurrection de l'esprit grec avec une musique moderne.’
78 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 130.
79 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 89.
80 Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, 131. La Chanson d’Ève, Op. 95 (1907–10); Piano Quintet no. 2 in C Minor, Op. 115 (1919–21); ‘Inscription sur le sable’, eighth and final song of Le jardin clos, Op. 106 (1915); and ‘Danseuse’, the fourth and final song of Mirages, Op. 113 (1919); Pénélope (1913).
81 Christopher Corbier, ‘La Grèce de Charles Koechlin’, in Charles Koechlin: compositeur et humaniste, ed. Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche and Michel Duchesneau (Paris: Vrin, 2010): 327–47.
82 Koechlin defends his case for the dissemination of classical music across all classes in a number of articles written during the interwar period. Recent work on Koechlin's political thought in relationship to music includes Michel Duchesneau, ‘Charles Koechlin et la musique pour le people: l'humanisme à la rencontre du socialisme’, and Liouba Bouscant, ‘Charles Koechlin politicien: l'engagement des années 1930’, both in Cathé, Douche and Duchesneau, eds, Charles Koechlin: compositeur et humaniste, 131–44; 145–74 respectively.
83 Koechlin, La musique et le peuple (Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1936).
84 Charles Koechlin, ‘Les tendances de la musique française’, in Encyclopédie de la musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, ed. Albert Lavignac and Lionel de La Laurencie, vol. 1 (Paris: Delagrave, 1925): 67. ‘On n'a pas toujours compris la modération des moyens par quoi s'exprime la force, chez M. Fauré; ainsi le voyageur venu d’Égypte se méprend sur la grandeur vraie du Parthénon, qui n'est point celle de l’étendue matérielle, mais des proportions. Or, c'est dans les « rapports parfaits » qu'on discerne ce don essentiellement grec, ce tact suprême, cet équilibre définitif que l'on s'accorde à reconnaître à nos meilleurs classiques.’
85 It is noteworthy that Koechlin's appreciation of Fauré's Greekness does not argue for the significance of the composer's harmonization of the Hymne à Apollon based on musical notation discovered in 1892 at Delphi by the French School in Athens and later published by Théodore Reinach and Henri Weil. See Gabriel Fauré, Hymne à Apollon, Op. 63bis (1894).
86 On masculinity in Third Republic France, see Serkis, Judith, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Forth, Christopher E. and Taithe, Bertrand, eds, French Masculinities: History, Culture and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar.
87 Albert Febvre-Longeray, ‘Gabriel Fauré par Philippe Fauré-Fremiet’, Mercure de France, 15 May 1930, 214–15.
88 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Gabriel Fauré et ses mélodies (Paris: Plon, 1938): 239Google Scholar.
89 Jankélévitch, Gabriel Fauré et ses mélodies, 249.
90 Jankélévitch, Gabriel Fauré et ses mélodies, 249.
91 Jankélévitch, Gabriel Fauré et ses mélodies, 250: ‘La musique de Fauré, comme la pudeur elle-même, est une espèce de secret: elle décourage les lourdauds, les sourds et les touristes, mais elle parle tout bas à l'oreille de ceux qui méritent d'entendre.’