Gabriel Faure - Piano Quintets Nos.1 & 2

Gabriel FAURE  (1845-1924)

Piano Quintet No. 1,in D minor, Op. 89 (1887-95, revised 1903-05)A Eugène Ysaÿe 

Piano Quintet No. 2,in C minor, Op. 115 (1919-21) A Paul Dukas

The Schubert Ensemble of London

Simon Blendis (violin)

Maya Koch (violin)

Douglas Paterson (viola)

Jane Salmon (cello)

William Howard (piano)

Recorded 16-18 March 2009, at Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk, UK

Review:

Fauré: Quintets for Piano and Strings

The first composer to write piano quintets seems to have been Boccherini in the late eighteenth century. But Fauré, thinking about the medium in the late nineteenth, was unlikely to have used these as a model, any more than those of Berwald or Borodin. Even the one by his teacher Saint-Saëns, written at the age of twenty, was hardly grist to the mill of Fauré, now over twice that age and a composer newly basking in the success of his Second Piano Quartet. Far more likely contenders were the quintets by Schumann (1842) and Brahms (1864), and above all the one by Franck, premiered at the Société nationale in 1880, with Saint-Saëns playing the piano part.

Quintet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 89

But there would be no question of slavish imitation. Even though Fauré possessed considerable keyboard skills (his refusal to embrace a soloist’s career seems to have stemmed from antipathy to the life rather than from any technical failings), it is clear from the start of the D minor Quintet that the piano is not going to follow the three quintets mentioned above in becoming any sort of leader. Instead, for the first two minutes or so it indulges in creditable harp imitations, while the strings announce the themes, and this restraint continues to be a mark of the piano writing almost throughout.

The form of the first movement has sometimes puzzled critics, some finding it too long for its material. By contrast, the Fauré scholar Carlo Caballero feels that the coda is ‘almost like high Renaissance polyphony brought into a new harmonic world’. But it has to be admitted that the whole work only reveals itself after close and repeated listening. Partly this may be the result of its long gestation, from 1887 to 1905; partly it may be because during that period Fauré’s style was changing, introducing the ‘new harmonic world’ of which Caballero speaks, and which Saint-Saëns confessed to Fauré he could not always make sense of.

A further puzzle is the tempo of the first movement. Fauré originally marked the movement ‘Allegro molto moderato’, and he removed the ‘Allegro’ only at the last minute. As to the metronome mark of crotchet = 69, this may have been a (dyslexic?) mistake by someone at the American publishers Schirmer, not picked up in transatlantic correspondence by Fauré, and there are good grounds for changing it to crotchet = 96, as the performers do here. Quite possibly the string players at an initial play-through had seen ‘Allegro’ and over-reacted, turning the piano part into a virtuoso cascade of arpeggios – not what Fauré had in mind.

Whatever the new elements in the work, Fauré remained faithful to his love of scales and sequences. The four-note scalic patterns of the first movement are continued in the opening cello lines of the  Adagio , and still more insistently in the  Allegretto moderato  finale. Here Fauré counters the floating quality of the work so far with a theme that could not be more square-cut, one four-bar phrase following another. As for the sequences, they are now less predictable in both outline and harmony than in Fauré’s earlier works, and often interleaved with new ideas. For the listener, perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole piece is the consistently full texture, with barely anything in the nature of a solo. Within this consistency, the interest lies in the various turns of melody and harmony, as unpredictable as can be. Only in the final bars (and even here there is a momentary hesitation) does Fauré drive on to the end – and wonderfully exciting it is. 

The Paris premiere of the First Quintet on 30 April 1906 was greeted with wild applause; Louis Vierne wrote that he had seen nothing like it since the premiere of Franck’s Quintet over a quarter of a century earlier, and that Fauré was recalled to the platform no fewer than five times. It is curious therefore that he wrote no more chamber music till the Second Violin Sonata ten years later. But he more than made up for this with the six chamber works he composed during the last eight years of his life.

 

Quintet No. 2 in C minor, Op. 115

The Second Piano Quintet was written between September 1919 and February 1921 and premiered on 21 May that year. By the summer of 1919 Fauré had been Director of the Paris Conservatoire for fourteen years. Quite apart from ‘the daily problems, large and small, which poison that place’, his deafness was now too serious to be ignored and it was agreed that he would step down a year later. ‘I can’t emphasise enough’, he confided to his wife, ‘how much I’m  savouring the idea of my deliverance !’

Whether or not as a result, this Second Quintet breathes a sunnier air than the First. At the very start, in the words of Jean-Michel Nectoux, ‘the troubled litany of the First Quintet is here transformed into a powerful melody which sweeps all before it like a mighty river’. In this  Allegro moderato , piano arpeggios again set the scene, but now in the bass register – no longer ethereal, but earthy and urgent. At the same time, through the work Fauré almost entirely avoids the very lowest register of the keyboard – possibly owing to his aural problems which distorted extremes of pitch. Although his favourite scales play their part, the ear is taken by a theme centred on an octave leap, recalling Ulysses’s theme in his opera  Pénélope ; but this is now rather a fireside memory of heroism past.

Fauré had toyed with the idea of including a scherzo in the First Quintet, and his decision against doing so may provide further support for taking its opening movement at a faster tempo. But the scherzo of the Second Quintet,  Allegro vivo , was the first movement Fauré wrote, finished together with the  Andante   moderato  by August 1920. It is one of his most astonishing inventions, pushing tonality as far as he would ever take it and (as any pianist will testify) subverting habitual finger patterns. A string tune, in an arching shape common to many of the themes, restores some semblance of order, and finally Fauré unites the two ideas to form a triumphant conclusion. In the  Andante  the arch shape and scales underpin most of the material. One of the chief delights is the textural inventiveness with which Fauré pairs lines – second violin with cello, viola with piano right hand – producing an effect of breathing between the fuller passages. Another is his sheer playfulness, teasing us with intimations of a final cadence some twenty-five bars before it finally arrives.

The finale,  Allegro molto , begins, for the third time in the work, with a tune on viola, again arch-shaped, against syncopated octaves on the piano. These become a major feature of the movement, contributing much to its lightness and grace. Overall one is reminded of a master juggler, throwing balls in the air at different distances and angles, always in control and smiling the while. Even if, at the first performance, Fauré heard little if anything of the music from his box, he did hear and acknowledge the thunderous applause. But smugness was not in his nature. 

Roger Nichols