Fauré: Masques et Bergamasques Suite, Op.112 (1919)
Ouverture:- Allegro molto vivo
Menuet:- Tempo di minuetto. Allegretto moderato
Gavotte:- Allegro vivo
Pastorale:- Andantino tranquillo
As with one or two other familiar composers – notably Beethoven and Shostakovich – the last years of Fauré’s life saw his musical mind turning inwards, concentrating on chamber music and small scale instrumental (and vocal) works. This development is far less unexpected than with those aforementioned masters: Fauré was never a composer of an inherently dramatic or theatrical disposition – lovers of the familiar Requiem will know that in this work he had no pretensions to being a Berlioz or a Verdi; and big orchestral works hardly figure at all in his output. Yet here, at the age of 74, we have music written for both orchestra (if not particularly large) and theatre! In September 1918 he had been commissioned to supply eight movements of incidental music for what Robert Orledge describes as a “one-act choreographic divertissement”, based around the Commedia del Arte, for production in Monte Carlo in April the following year. The librettist for his opera Pénélope, René Fauchois, was to adapt material by Verlaine, and the composer similarly reworked some of his own earlier compositions for much of the new score. So not only is this not quite the late period orchestral work we might have hoped for (apart from the Pastorale and the Menuet – composed especially for the divertissement), but deliberately looks back to a much earlier era in its musical language. Four of the movements were later extracted for the present suite, for performance on 16 November 1919 at the Paris Conservatoire.
The Ouverture was actually composed and performed in 1868 – and may have been included in a Symphony in F major (which has not survived): it displays a decidedly Classical energy and spirit, thoroughly good humoured, with a second subject that could almost have been written by Mendelssohn! The Gavotte was also part of that symphony – having already been arranged from a piano piece in C sharp minor. But it is the concluding Pastorale where we finally get a glimpse of Fauré’s later style: essentially one of inward communion and contemplation, a rare and precious glimpse into an ordered, civilised world of elegance and serenity.
© Alan George
