When I am no longer here, you will hear about my work: ‘Afterall, it was nothing but that! … ‘ Maybe it will be left behind … There is always a moment when it is forgotten … None of that is important. I did what I could … and now, judge, my God!Footnote 1
In recent years, considerable musicological work has been devoted to examining the ways in which the posthumous reputations of musicians and composers of the French Belle Époque have been cultivated.Footnote 2 Understanding that canons are socially negotiated, and that discourse can be shaped to reflect a wide variety of social realities, researchers have been attuned to the various communicative strategies that have enabled the music and legacies of deceased musicians to remain in the public ear. They have also acknowledged that the creation of posthumous reputations and the construction of legacy depend on various forms of advocacy. Certainly, the composer plays an important role – through their music, words, artistic networks, professional status and countless other social activities – in shaping the way they will be viewed after their death. But those who outlive them and who seek to further the artist's cause also play a fundamental role by shaping and interpreting their legacy. These ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ however, rarely show a complete lack of self-interest: whether family members, critics or composers, the portrait they paint of the deceased invariably reflects an ensemble of personal values, professional prerogatives and aesthetic mandates that they aim to uphold.Footnote 3 The defence and construction of Claude Debussy's posthumous reputation has been of particular relevance to this musicological pursuit and an especially complex one when we consider that Debussy's musical influence was largely repudiated in the intergenerational quarrel launched by Jean Cocteau and Les Six almost immediately after Debussy's death in 1918. But the broader issues surrounding posthumous commemoration or advocacy is not at all limited to special cases: most individuals are subject to rituals of memorialization, and what and how people choose to remember and celebrate is generally linked to various exigencies that, although informed by the memory of the deceased, are nonetheless determined by the present.
Gabriel Fauré's death on 4 November 1924 was marked by an elaborate funeral that was staged and paid for by the French State. As a venerated composer and former director of the Paris Conservatory who had been elevated in 1923 to the rank of ‘Grand Croix’ of the Légion d'honneur the impressive response to his passing was certainly appropriate, though surprising for a figure whose works were nonetheless relatively little known by the general public.Footnote 4 Furthermore, as Jean-Michel Nectoux has suggested, the pomp and grandiloquence of the State funeral contrasted notably with Fauré's otherwise discreet and unassuming character.Footnote 5 As Carlo Caballero observes in his study of Fauré's aesthetics, fame came late to the composer and was more the result of his official administrative appointments than a broader interest or appreciation for his music.Footnote 6 Caballero cites a 1938 appraisal of Fauré's reputation by René Dumesnil in which the latter suggests that the composer's modesty and reluctance to ‘supplant his first successes as a composer of songs with the more substantial, large scale-works he composed later’, were major reasons for the relative neglect of large swaths of Fauré's music.Footnote 7 Indeed, Fauré's attachment to the ideal of artistic ‘sincerity’ meant that he became increasingly impermeable to the dictates of fashion; he did not tend to compose to secure personal gain, and he avoided using stylistic and technical innovations as a means of whipping up public attention for his works.Footnote 8 Although such an attitude should not be construed as a complete lack of self-interestedness, Fauré's approach to composition did nonetheless veer strongly towards an art-for-art's-sakes attitude wherein, as his pupil Louis Aubert would later state, ‘everything … is elaborated in terms of beauty and beauty alone’.Footnote 9 And although the writings of Nectoux, Caballero, Dumesmil and Aubert all participate in their own ways in the posthumous constructions of Fauré, this portrait of the composer and his music as hermetic, understated, and even modest appears (from our current standpoint) to be somewhere close to the truth. Taking these factors into consideration, Caballero for one has suggested that Fauré ‘may be partly to blame for the impairment of his own reputation’.Footnote 10
I argue that the discourses that developed about Fauré and his music in the years surrounding his death developed in ways that contrast with the aforementioned assessments in that they centred around positioning the composer as a ‘classic’. The notion of the ‘classic’ – or indeed ‘classicism’ tout court – was, however, extremely multivalent in the context of post-World War I France and, as I suggest below, Fauré's classicism was discursively constructed in at least three different ways, each of them fulfilling specific functions relating to the prerogatives of reputational entrepreneurship. I look first at the discourse surrounding two State-endorsed celebrations of the composer: the 1922 national ‘homage’ held in the presence of the composer at the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, and the State funeral of 1924. What emerged from the State funeral was an attempt to monumentalize Fauré in a way that would position him within the classic lineage of Republican ‘great men’, a particularly pervasive post-war impulse in a country anxious to reassert its grandeur, both political and cultural. Next, I examine assessments of Fauré in the writings of Les Six, and especially Georges Auric, who construes Fauré as an example of the nationally classic and positions him and his music in the lineage of French composers of the Ancien Régime. Finally, many writers, most notably Charles Koechlin, aimed to establish Fauré's music as an example of the revitalisation of Ancient Greek aesthetics in the modern world.
My primary sources for examining this inter-war construction of Fauré as ‘classic’ are the various written homages, critical reviews, and biographical studies published in France throughout the 1920s.Footnote 11 Of course, these writings should be understood in the larger context of the redefinition and articulation of ‘classicism’, as well as the emergence of ‘neoclassicism’ as a dominant aesthetic concern during the post-war period. And as I show, they also provide insight into the commemorative ethos of early inter-war France, and the anxieties and hopes that are bound up in modern attempts to remember and celebrate the past.
Classic Great Man
The confrontation of Fauré's ‘modesty, self-erasure and delicate Atticism’ with public attempts to instrumentalize and monumentalize his reputation were already apparent before his death.Footnote 12 In 1922, for example, a ‘national homage’ was organized in Fauré's honour at the Sorbonne.Footnote 13 The event was held in the university's Grand Amphitheatre, and performances of Fauré's music took place in front of the monumental canvas, entitled ‘Le Bois sacré’, by Puvis de Chavannes. As one commentator remarked, this organizational gesture brought together ‘two geniuses, brothers through their purity, their immaterial nobility, each with their own order of greatness’.Footnote 14 Top-tier performers were engaged for the festivities: Henri Rabaud, Vincent d'Indy, Philippe Gaubert, Henri Büsser and André Messager took turns at the conductor's podium; Alfred Cortot, Pablo Casals and Robert Lortat were featured as soloists, and singers Claire Croiza, Jeanne Raunay and Charles Panzéra interpreted songs from across the composer's oeuvre, including the cycle L'horizon chimérique Op. 118 which had been published the preceding year.Footnote 15 Fauré observed the proceedings from the gallery of honour where he was accompanied by numerous dignitaries including the Minister of Fine Arts, Léon Bérard, and the French president, Alexandre Millerand. Despite the amphitheatre's impressive dimensions, press reports emphasized the intimate quality of the event. The Times called it a ‘distinguished gathering’ and the critic for Le Temps recounted how ‘every piece was met with lengthy applause by the audience who turned toward the Master with the most affectionate enthusiasm until he would rise and respond to these acclamations by acknowledging those assembled with gracious modesty’.Footnote 16 Over three hours of music was performed, but there was no Requiem or Pénélope. Rather, the cavernous amphitheatre was transformed into an intimate salon: short orchestral works, chamber music and melodies were placed at the fore of a programme for the extreme pleasure of Fauré's disciples in attendance: Louis Aubert, André Caplet, Florent Schmitt, Emile Vuillermoz, Maurice Ravel, Charles Koechlin and Roger-Ducasse.Footnote 17 Organized by Fernand Maillot as a means of raising funds for the somewhat impoverished Fauré, the event sought to finally glorify a man whose lifework had been characterized by modesty and discretion and a complete lack of arrivisme: ‘without noise, without advertisement, without any recommendation other than that of his music, quietly, discreetly, Fauré has entered into glory.’Footnote 18
According to various press reports, such an official celebration of a living musician, which included the attendance of the French president, was unprecedented.Footnote 19 Photos of the event were circulated internationally and no doubt served a political purpose by implicitly asserting that French music was still thriving despite the deleterious effects of five years of war. Indeed, Paul le Flem, a particularly committed defender of Fauré, argued that the homage transcended national interests; regarding this solely as a national ceremony would ‘singularly misrepresent the quality and the universality of the art that Fauré created’.Footnote 20 Others stressed that the absence of political speeches ensured that the celebration did not ‘take an ugly turn’, and the event was organized so as to solely feature Fauré's art, described by Reynaldo Hahn as music that adopts the ‘tone of an intimate confession’.Footnote 21 Whereas some questioned why the composer's ‘considerable’ masterpieces – like Pénélope and the Requiem – were not performed, they were clearly in the minority.Footnote 22 The Sorbonne event, despite its size and quasi-public nature, endeavoured to honour Fauré in a manner befitting his personality. It was a sign of deep respect for a man who, in a letter to his wife written in 1921, admitted that ‘I am completely indifferent to the development of my reputation’.Footnote 23
Other initiatives, motivated no doubt by the reality of Fauré's failing health, celebrated the composer in the closing years of his life: a special issue of La Revue musicale honouring the composer was published in 1922 and a number of important concerts by the Société musicale indépendante and the Société nationale were organized throughout the early 1920s.Footnote 24 As Nectoux claims, ‘never perhaps had the works of Fauré been performed as much as during the euphoric period that we call the “crazy years” (années folles)’.Footnote 25 And during the last few years of his life, Fauré's large-scale works began to performed with more regularity, including the Requiem, Pénélope and also Prométhée in a new orchestration by Fauré's student, Roger Ducasse.Footnote 26
When Fauré died on 4 November 1924 the French State became further involved in marking his legacy and to celebrating his contribution. Whereas Debussy's death in 1918 coincided with a German bombing campaign on the French capital that precluded the possibility of a significant public commemoration, Fauré's passing marshalled the entire apparatus of the State to mount a national funeral. The implications of this decision should not be underestimated: State funerals were nothing if not grand. As Avner Ben-Amos has written, ‘all of the decorative elements – the drapes, the statues, the catafalque, and the wreaths – were huge, in order to aggrandize the great man and make his entry into the national memory as impressive as possible’.Footnote 27 And even though, after World War I, the decorative tendency of State funerals moved from the ostentatious to the more prosaic, Fauré's funeral was nonetheless accompanied by impressive pomp that served as an apotheosis not only of the deceased, but of the Republic itself. For indeed, State funerals, wholly paid for by the public purse, were reserved exclusively for figures who were deemed as having served the cause of the Republic through an exemplary embodiment of its ideals and strengths while also showing a life-long dedication to its institutions and symbols. And in the immediate post-war years, the frequency of such funerals had increased;Footnote 28 as Jane F. Fulcher has suggested, in a post-war climate of mourning they could serve a clear political purpose by helping to ‘shore up’ existing Republican symbols and to respectfully memorialize human loss writ large.Footnote 29
Indeed, political considerations – whether broadly ideological or pragmatically self-serving ones – could easily outweigh the State's sense of obligation or genuine acknowledgment of the person being commemorated. As composer Charles Koechlin later revealed, the Minister of Public Instruction, François Albert, under whose mandate State funerals were managed, did not actually know who Gabriel Fauré was.Footnote 30 In fact, despite having been lobbied for by some of Fauré's supporters, it was not at all assured that Fauré would be honoured in this way. As Ben-Amos reports, it was Paul Léon, director of the Ministry of Fine Arts, who urged Albert to grant a State funeral to Fauré, and Albert ultimately consented only after having been told by the ex-Minister of Justice, Louis Barthou, that doing so would improve Albert's public image.Footnote 31 Fauré's funeral ceremony was thus in some ways strategically appropriated by the State and its representatives, and allowed it to project values that did not necessarily align with those of the deceased. As Jean-Michel Nectoux has suggested, ‘the funereal triumph’ offered to Fauré was in fact fundamentally at odds with the composer's customary discretion.Footnote 32
As opposed to the earlier ‘hommage national’ celebrated in the relative intimacy of the Sorbonne amphitheatre, the State funeral was held at the Church of the Madeleine, which had also served for the two previous State funerals organized for French composers, namely those of Charles Gounod (1893) and Camille Saint-Saëns (1921). Fauré's funeral was religious, an inevitable choice for a man who had been so closely tied to religious institutions throughout his career whatever his own apparent ambivalence with regard to matters of personal faith.Footnote 33 Fauré's Requiem was performed and thereby ensured a sense of musical grandeur befitting the occasion, but the work no doubt fulfilled further ancillary mnemonic purposes by invoking the war dead, or even, the symbolic passing of the pre-war era, one that would soon be retrospectively re-invented as ‘La Belle Époque’.Footnote 34
As was customary for such events, members of various branches of government, State institutions and associations were present and addressed the large crowds that attended the ceremony. Henri Rabaud (Conservatoire de Paris), Auguste Laguillermie (Institut de France), Paul Vidal (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique – SACEM), Adolphe Boschot (Association de la critique musicale), Nadia Boulanger (representing Fauré's former students), Mr Marquis (representing the Ariège region from which Fauré hailed), Vincent d'Indy (Société nationale de musique), Mr Heurtel (École Niedermeyer) and François Albert (French government) all made speeches from the peristyle of the Madeleine following the service. These speeches, many excerpts of which were reproduced in the daily press, rehearsed familiar tropes: concentrating on his public service and accomplishments, they highlighted Fauré's ties to Republican values and the way they intertwined with the history of the regime.
François Albert's oration, ghost-written by the music critic Robert Brussel, lauded Fauré's sincerity, a quality that ‘marked each of his works, all of his gestures, every one of his words during his long life’.Footnote 35 Indeed, the image of an honourable yet disinterested servant to the cause of French music is the portrait drawn by Albert: ‘like a good worker who never finishes his labour other than to take rest for the night, Fauré did not fall into an eternal sleep until having completed the entirety of his task’.Footnote 36 Albert's speech, in keeping with the conventions of the State funeral, bid adieu to Fauré by invoking national pride and by suggesting that the composer's works and the ‘treasures of his genius’ would continue to increase the status of French art in the years to come.Footnote 37 Fauré was, in the words of Albert, ‘a renovator, a precursor, a prophet of what is to come as well as being a classic attached to the eternal principles of beauty’.Footnote 38 Indeed, all of the speeches engaged with a teleological account of Fauré's artistic trajectory, one that culminated in his relatively late, ostensibly crowning achievement: the opera, Pénélope. For Albert, this ‘masterpiece’ was ‘inscribed on the tablets of our artistic laws along with the names of Lully and Rameau’. For André Messager, although Fauré's character was ‘essentially French’, Pénélope ‘may be placed in the first row of operatic productions of all time and from all countries; it will suffice to ensure the immortality of its author’.Footnote 39 And throughout these speeches words such as ‘purity’, ‘simplicity’ and ‘grandeur’ were commonly evoked. Such themes were all to the profit of the State which, in organizing such ceremonies, expected a symbolic return on its investment. Participating in a post-war tendency that sought to monumentalize its ‘great men’ of the early twentieth century, Fauré's funeral, like all State funerals, functioned as an elaborate synecdoche that buttressed the State in its projection of itself. As Alfred Bruneau would later suggest in his speech that marked his election to Fauré's vacant chair at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the work of Fauré, was ‘simple, solid, severe and strong’.Footnote 40 Such an assessment, light-years away from the delicacy, discretion, and modesty of Fauré's musical world, is curious indeed, and, as we shall see, it constituted a pervasive discursive thread in writing about the composer throughout much of the inter-war period.
Classic French
Despite the official honours granted him at the end of his life, upon his death there were ostensibly very few indicators that Fauré's music would meet with continued support given the tremendous changes in French music since the end of World War I. Indeed, the official celebration of Fauré's achievements by the State could have been turned against him in the rapidly evolving aesthetic jousts that typified the early activities of the group Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc) and their associates and supporters (Erik Satie and writer Jean Cocteau among others). Satie's famous quip about Maurice Ravel's refusal of the Légion d'Honneur and Les Six's rejection of Wagnerism and Debussyism could easily have claimed Fauré as collateral damage. When Francis Poulenc claimed in Le Coq Parisien, that ‘the vulgar melody is good if it has been found … Refinement almost always makes modern French musicians lose their popular accent’, he was pointing his finger at an entire swath of Belle Époque musicians, Fauré included.Footnote 41 Furthermore, one of Fauré's former students and one of his most intrepid advocates during the post-war period and beyond – the critic Émile Vuillermoz – was also one of Les Six's most strident opponents. It would have been easy, perhaps even appropriate, in this generational conflict for Les Six to throw Fauré under the bus so as to better assert the aesthetic prerogatives of their own brand of musical ‘ultramodernism’.Footnote 42
Yet, for the most part, this was not the case. Although the heritage of Debussyian ‘impressionism’ loomed large in Les Six's attacks on pre-war aesthetics, Fauré escaped being implicated in this way and was indeed favourably viewed by some members of the group, notably Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger.Footnote 43 In a 1923 article about Fauré, Henri Collet, famously responsible for bringing ‘Les Six’ to public attention, wrote of Fauré in terms of ‘classical genius’.Footnote 44 This label was positively employed to counter the more common descriptions of Fauré's music as containing ‘a gracious gift of melody, and a certain voluptuous approach’. Fauré, Collet argues, was not simply a ‘French Schumann’ and was misunderstood as solely a composer of ‘lieder’; rather, he was ‘the incarnation of French musical genius’ that was both ‘classic and innovative’, ‘strong and agreeable’, ‘expansive yet measured’.Footnote 45 Collet was particularly motivated to locate in Fauré's music a type of ‘strength’ (force) and to thereby position the composer's music within a clearly masculinized aesthetics that was a prominent feature of the post-war and neo-classicizing ethos.Footnote 46 His music is ‘subtle and strong’ (subtile et puissant), and the force of his music is ‘latent’. Collet speaks of Fauré's first quintet as ‘stocky’ and ‘square’; the second Sonata for Violin and Piano is ‘decisive’; his opera Pénélope has the ‘brilliant strength’ of Wagner.Footnote 47 A tripartite periodization of the composer's output, an interpretive approach that itself referenced the ‘classical’ by evoking the model of Beethoven, was also put forward by Collet, and indeed set the stage for further comparisons between the two composers that would be drawn throughout the 1920s.Footnote 48
In her study of Les Six, Eveline Hurard-Viltard claims that, at best, Les Six considered Fauré either with ‘platonic admiration or courteous indifference’.Footnote 49 But in December 1922, six months after the national homage to Fauré at the Sorbonne, Georges Auric penned an article for Les Nouvelles littéraires entitled ‘Autour de Gabriel Fauré’ that elevated the composer as a type of model for young French composers seeking to extricate themselves from the influence of the foreign avant-garde.Footnote 50 In it, Auric celebrates Fauré for having ‘so well preserved, with both strength and suppleness, without weakness nor heaviness, the reins with which French genius has been able to uphold, in its best periods, the most ardent of inspirations’.Footnote 51 For Auric, such a championing of Fauré was in part prompted by a conscious modification in his own aesthetic interests which he had highlighted in a letter to Paul Collaer just two days before the above article was printed. In that letter Auric announced his rejection of Schoenberg, Webern and Bartók: ‘There was no point in throwing so many stones at Wagner just to end up with Austrian intoxication’.Footnote 52 Auric's article in Les Nouvelles littéraires professes the same sentiment, but here the figure of Fauré emerges as the historical model that could provide guidance to those looking to escape the ‘dryness, dogmatism and abstractions’ that Auric had come to associate with international musical modernism. In such a climate, Fauré's music, he claims, offers a model of a composer who had the courage to go against fashion and the talent to create ‘a syntax, and a characteristic style that is recognizable, lively and solid’.Footnote 53
Auric's advocacy for Fauré was structured on nationalist lines and sought to encourage young French composers to look to their own heritage (he also names Gounod and Debussy) for a path forward. He writes, ‘it is here that tomorrow a young student thrown into this troubled world will go to find refreshment’.Footnote 54 Auric aligns Fauré's music with a nationalist canon, claiming that his music contains something of the sensuality of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French clavecinistes, thus closely associating it with historical French classicism. In fact, following Fauré's death, Auric was especially wary of official messaging that might encourage audiences to expect only monumental grandeur in the works of this ‘great man’. Reflecting on Fauré's piano pieces, he wonders whether ‘fans of art are certain to have truly understood the virtue of these works – their substance, their rhythm, made evident by hundreds of exquisite passages, everything that makes these pages something other than perishable structures’.Footnote 55 Rather than extoll the few works in Fauré's output that were impressive from the point of view of size and scale (like Pénélope, Prométhée or the Requiem) Auric argues for the importance of Fauré's ‘little known pages’ as being both the most significant and the most resistant to foreign influence.
Auric's rejection of modern foreign music and his embrace of Fauré's art along the lines of nationalist traditions may be viewed more broadly within the ideas of ‘le retour à l'ordre’, the post-war aesthetic movement that championed classicism, increasingly conceived as ‘neoclassicism’, throughout the 1920s. Writing about French modern music in 1922, critic André Cœuroy– favourable to the initiatives of Les Six – wrote that ‘all of our musicians, according to their divergent tendencies, and taking the most opposing factions into consideration, work towards the idea so perfectly defined by Gabriel Fauré: the taste for clarity in thought, sobriety and purity in form’.Footnote 56 Indeed, anticipating Jean Cocteau's 1926 Le Rappel à l'ordre, but following on the heels of Pablo Picasso's post-war interest in the ‘classic’ painter Jean-Auguste Ingres (1780–1867), as well as important theorizations of the ‘classic’ by esteemed figures like André Gide, Auric's advocacy for Fauré speaks to a growing consensus around the composer's status as a classical and national touchstone for France's youngest composers. Already in 1920, in his famous article that introduced Les Six to the broader public, Henri Collet listed Fauré as a figure who offered ‘French music from France’ as opposed to that of Debussy, Ravel or Stravinsky.Footnote 57 Over a decade later, Darius Milhaud would offer the same conclusion, stating that:
Gabriel Fauré pursued his work with calm, confidence and magnificent clarity. What did it matter to him the heavy Wagnerian clamours, the ‘good intentions’ of Father Franck, the complete renewal of musical technique brought in by Debussy, the complications of musical impressionism, the theories and discussions about polytonality and atonality? Fauré only had to let his heart sing and gave us the most tender, the sincerest types of music.Footnote 58
Of course, not all the members of Les Six would agree with such assessments. Arthur Honegger, for example, later admitted that as a young man he had pejoratively viewed Fauré as an ‘elegant salon musician’. Initially he had believed that Fauré's music ‘lacked strength’ and was too ambiguous and ultimately un-Beethovenian for his tastes, a position that he would later revise.Footnote 59 As for Francis Poulenc, despite the fact that many of Fauré's melodies appeared in the recitals and recordings he made with baritone Pierre Bernac, his opinion of Fauré's music veered close to hatred. Poulenc took issue with numerous aspects of Fauré's music (his orchestrations, his ubiquitous use of arpeggiation, even his literary tastes), and seemed to be especially perturbed by the official type of ‘classicism’ with which he had been associated: ‘Why must the cult of Fauré be an obligation in the same way as military service?’, he asked rhetorically in 1952.Footnote 60 What further reduced the composer's reputation in Poulenc's eyes was that, unlike Debussy, Ravel and Satie, Fauré had not durably influenced younger generations of composers.Footnote 61 For him, the proclamations of Auric in the 1920s had never come to pass.
The support offered by the young generation to Fauré's legacy thus seems in retrospect more ideologically self-serving than actually grounded in a desire to truly imitate his music. Fauré's independence, his resistance to Wagner and the indigenous catholicity of his musical tastes meant that he became a figure who composers like Auric could symbolically uphold in their attempt to break free from foreign avant-garde influences in the mid-1920s. Fauré was positioned as a type of precursor of modern classicism; he exemplified an ensemble of values and broad aesthetic categories that, in this context, were amenable to composers for whom classicism had become a modern virtue. And, as André Gide argued in the 1920s, classicism was ‘so peculiarly a French invention, that for a little I would consider the two words, classic and French, as synonymous’.Footnote 62 Fauré benefitted from the conflation of these two terms in the eyes of the younger generation, and became a symbol, for a time, of French classicism in the 1920s.
Classic Greek
Another way that Fauré's reputation as a ‘classic’ was constructed following his death was through describing his music and aesthetics in relationship to Greek antiquity. Numerous sources from this period allude to Fauré in this manner and they do so to make different types of claims, whether to reinforce Fauré's appurtenance to a specific idea of French nationalism or as a means of describing the aesthetic and technical aspects of his works. At Fauré's funeral Adolphe Boschot called Fauré a ‘Greco-French’ composer.Footnote 63 In his 1924 study, Un demi-siècle de musique française (1870–1919), Julien Tiersot is frank in his assertion: ‘Mr Fauré, in fact, is Greek’, while Florent Schmitt, writing in a 1931 article, proposed that the composer was ‘essentially Greco-Latin’.Footnote 64 All of these assessments derive from the strongly held nationalist convictions of their authors and work to articulate Fauré's musical contribution within a historical paradigm uniting French and Ancient Greek civilization that had become a pillar of Third Republic mythology.
The most influential advocate of this notion, however, was no doubt the composer Charles Koechlin. Koechlin's 1927 biography of Fauré, simply entitled Gabriel Fauré, was significant for a number of reasons.Footnote 65 Unlike the many journalistic portraits of Fauré, Koechlin's was a full-length study written by a former student and one who had intimate knowledge of the composer's music, having himself orchestrated some of Fauré's works at the composer's request.Footnote 66 Koechlin was an admired member of Fauré's professional circle, and throughout the 1920s his own compositional activities were complemented by particularly important theoretical, aesthetic and sociological writings that attracted considerable attention from France's most elite musical circles. For this reason, his biography of Fauré would have been perceived and received as the work of an ‘expert’, written from a particularly authoritative cultural position.Footnote 67 Koechlin vouches for his own authority on a number of occasions throughout the book, starting in the preface where he states: ‘let me add that having known Fauré over numerous years, having seen him close up (notably at his class at the conservatory), our testimony retains in many cases the precision of first-hand documents’.Footnote 68
As was the case for his biography of Debussy, Koechlin's book on Fauré was in certain fundamental ways a revisionist account.Footnote 69 Although it opens with an obligatory biographical sketch followed by a chapter in seven sections commenting on Fauré's works in various genres, it is the last section, entitled ‘L'Homme et le style’, where the originality of Koechlin's assessment becomes the most apparent. Here, the author proposes that Fauré's ‘sensibility’ is fashioned from two ostensibly opposing forces: charm and strength, with the bulk of the chapter focusing on defining and refining these concepts as they relate to Fauré's aesthetic proclivities.Footnote 70 Koechlin argues that the combination of these elements – the mixture of tenderness and intimate energy; the harmony of sentiment and reason – are ‘essentially Greek’ and are at the root of the composer's general aesthetics. In terms of ‘charm’, Koechlin is most anxious to defend Fauré against charges that his music was the superficial work of a salon composer, an evaluation that, as we have seen, would remain persistently attached to Fauré's legacy. Yes, Koechlin, agrees, Fauré's music does engage with sensuality and seduction, and it was easy for critics to view these characteristics as the hallmarks of superficiality or ‘the image of material pleasure’.Footnote 71 But for Koechlin, this is just the tip of the iceberg; Fauré's sensuality, he claims, is rather like that of Mozart, Bach or even Debussy: it derives from the ability to translate pure musical thought in a way that evokes ‘profound sentiments’.Footnote 72
As for arguing for Fauré's ‘strength’, it is here that Koechlin thesis is perhaps the most revisionist, and in order to make his point he employs the example of the composer's tragédie lyrique, Prométhée, with a libretto by Jean Lorrain based on the play by Aeschylus. Koechlin's biography contains copious references to this work, which was first performed in 1900 at an open-air arena in the southern French town of Béziers.Footnote 73 An elaborate hybrid work, Prométhée features both long sections of spoken theatrical dialogue as well as an important musical score containing incidental music, arias and choruses. That Koechlin highlights this work in his biography is both surprising and unconventional. As the author was quick to admit, ‘very few musicians know Prométhée’, and apart from performances in Béziers in 1900 and 1901 it had only been performed in Paris three times (in 1907 at the Hippodrome de Paris, in 1917 at the Opéra in a new orchestration, and in 1924 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées).Footnote 74 Nonetheless, Fauré claimed that Prométhée was a watershed moment in Fauré's development, as it was here that the composer had his ‘first contact with Greek art’.Footnote 75 Koechlin had travelled to Béziers in the summer of 1901 to attend a reprise of the production, and in the 1922 special issue of the Revue musicale devoted to Fauré he shared at length his memories and enthusiasm for the work. Here already, he stated that Prométhée is ‘harmonious and strong, containing a force exempt of violence which is so typical of Greek art just as it is of so many of Fauré's works’.Footnote 76 In his 1927 biography, Koechlin develops these ideas further and proposes the striking thesis that Prométhée ‘influenced the rest of (Fauré's) career and encouraged from then on an almost stripped-down simplification reduced to essentials – themes of an almost Doric purity and, to be frank, a resurrection of the Greek spirit within a modern music’.Footnote 77 For Koechlin, Prométhée is a work of ‘austere force in which the bitterness retains a certain charm’.Footnote 78 It is a work in which strength and charm are united, inspired by ‘the pure aesthetics of the Greeks’.Footnote 79 But as the writer cautioned, Fauré's appropriation of these aesthetics was not solely prompted by the subject matter, rather the influence of Ancient Greece can be found throughout his later oeuvre: for Koechlin, Fauré's La Chanson d’Ève and the Second Quintet are Greek in the same way as ‘Inscription sur le sable’, ‘Danseuse’ and Pénélope.Footnote 80
Koechlin's highlighting of Prométhée in relation to Fauré's compositional development also served purposes unrelated to aesthetics. As Wheeldon has argued in relation to ‘reputational entrepreneurs’, self-interest plays an inevitable role in the narratives told by biographers. It allows them an opportunity not only to honour their subject, but also to further their own interests. In Koechlin's case, championing Fauré's ‘Greek’ aesthetics could be viewed as a manner of highlighting his own compositional attachment to these values. Christophe Corbier, for example, has shown that Koechlin's interest in Greek culture dated to the 1890s and spanned the entire inter-war period, culminating in the composition of his Choeurs pour Alceste, Op. 169 (1938).Footnote 81 But Koechlin's interest in Ancient Greece also contains a strong sociological dimension that informed his thinking on the place of music in modern society. Indeed, as a left-wing composer strongly attached to inter-war Socialist values, Koechlin viewed works like Prométhée as a fundamental experiment which sought to undermine the social monopoly that the bourgeoisie had come to exert on classical music. The collaborative performative forces of Prométhée at Béziers (which combined local amateurs and seasoned professionals) and the popular make-up of the audiences (the Béziers arena had seating from upward of ten thousand spectators) offered a model of artistic production that wrenched some of the power from the bourgeoisie and, in Koechlin's mind, allowed for music to be disseminated across all classes of society.Footnote 82 This line of thinking would evolve throughout the 1930s as Koechlin drew close to the French Popular Front; still during this period in socially minded publications like his La musique et le peuple, Koechlin would continue to idealistically represent Prométhée as a model of possible social cohesion that could reduce the barriers between the artistic elite and ‘the people’.Footnote 83
Koechlin's advocacy for a modern appropriation of Ancient Greek ideals was certainly part of the 1920s zeitgeist that elevated ‘classicism’ in all its forms as a dominant aesthetic direction of French art. Koechlin's revisionist account of Fauré attempted to draw the composer into an inter-war narrative in which true ‘classicism’ is defined in relationship to Greek Antiquity as opposed to its relationship to music written in the tonal tradition. As Koechlin wrote in 1925,
People have not always understood the moderation of means through which strength is expressed in the music of Fauré; … it is not a question of size, but of proportions. In fact, it is in these perfect ratios that we may discern this essentially Greek quality, this extreme tact, this definitive equilibrium that we agree to acknowledge in our best classics.Footnote 84
Fauré's classicism thus aligns with some of Koechlin's strongest aesthetic convictions of the 1920s. By positioning Fauré within the noble, timeless heritage of Classic Greek art, Koechlin elevates his teacher's music beyond bourgeois musical classicism defined solely with recourse to the tonal tradition. Indeed, Fauré's music, rather, displays an ensemble of characteristics (sobriety, equilibrium, concision, purity) supported by a musical language imbued with modality that places it on another, superior plane. Fauré is Greek not because his works have realist ‘archeological’ pretensions, but rather because the composer appropriated the most fundamental aspects of the Ancient Greek artistic sensibility.Footnote 85 When Koechlin concludes his biography by stating that Fauré is a ‘classical glory of France’ he is certainly celebrating a national treasure, but one whose originality derived from his fin-de-siècle encounter with Greek Antiquity.
Conclusion
In the three versions of ‘classic’ constructed around the figure of Gabriel Fauré – the great Republican man, the incarnation of French musical tradition, and the modern musical proponent of Ancient Greek aesthetics – a recurring anxiety emerges: that of Fauré's ‘strength’. In a Republican ethos that valued masculine virility and associated it with physical strength and prowess, Fauré's music was, in fact, a very delicate object upon which to construct a powerful symbol of the classic.Footnote 86 Whereas composers like Auric and Koechlin both put forward arguments for the strength (force) of Fauré's musical language, in a post-war context in which strength was closely associated with the aesthetics of the machine, such pleading was only likely to ever convince those already converted to the deceased composer's cause. In press articles throughout the 1920s, the theme of Fauré's ‘strength’ was consistently evoked. Reviewing Philippe Fauré-Fremiet's biography of his father, critic Albert Febvre-Longeray, for example, wrote about the puissance of Fauré's music: this ‘strength has nothing to do with the nuance fortissimo, but rather comes from the emotive force of the inflection of a phrase’. For the critic, ‘there is so much strength, energy and willpower in the works of the gentle Fauré’, so much so, in fact, that his works have a ‘dominating character’.Footnote 87
These discursive constructions of Fauré are revelatory not only for what they say about the composer's many reputational entrepreneurs, but more generally for how they speak to inter-war attitudes about greatness, accomplishment, cultural value and the literary habits of hagiography. Maintained throughout the 1920s by many of Fauré's posthumous advocates, the focus on Fauré's ‘strength’ would only begin to recede in the wake of the new exegetic insights into Fauré's music by philosopher and musicologist, Vladimir Jankélévitch. Jankélévitch's 1938 study, Gabriel Fauré et ses mélodies, constituted a quiet revolution in writing on the composer in that the author's prose aimed to reflect something of the poetry, subtlety and evasive harmony of the composer's music. In Jankélévitch's words, Fauré's music is only ‘strong’ in the way that it stimulates the imagination.Footnote 88 Indeed, nothing could be more different than the music of Beethoven and Fauré, a comparison with which the author concludes his study. Jankélévitch argues that ‘one does not need to be a musician to love Beethoven’ because his music is ‘impure, jammed with humanity, sociology and metaphysics, so much so that it seems to be at one with life’. Fauré's music, on the other hand, is ‘a closed garden … a magical space well protected from the promiscuities of the world’.Footnote 89 Jankélévitch suggests that only ‘a rare application of the heart and the mind’ allows people to taste Fauré's ‘exquisite and delicious language’.Footnote 90 In the closing paragraphs of his study he demolishes the thesis that held that promoting Fauré as a ‘classic’ would encourage interest and broader understanding of the composer's art. ‘Fauré's music, like modesty itself, is a type of secret: it discourages the oafs, the deaf and the tourists, but it speaks quietly to those who deserve to hear it’.Footnote 91 As opposed to arguing in favour of grandeur and classicism, Jankélévitch re-positioned the discourse on Fauré back towards qualities of intimacy, modesty and refinement. Rather than view these features as embarrassment or insufficiency, Jankélévitch regarded them as virtues. Inevitably, the elitism of these virtues – unavailable to the mere musical ‘tourist’ – would direct Fauré's posthumous reception away from mass audiences and the wide-spread recognition dreamed about by people like Charles Koechlin. Ultimately, the grand trappings of classicism, applied to readings of Fauré's music in different ways throughout the inter-war period, constituted a persistent though short-lived theme around which the composer's posthumous reputation was developed. Even if current understandings of Fauré rarely acknowledge ‘classicism’ as an essential category through which to examine his music, this article has suggested that it was nonetheless one that was repeatedly employed by his reputational entrepreneurs as they sought to advocate in his favour immediately following his death in 1924.
