We were going to do a whole week on Faure, and then Ukraine happened... Since nobody's focusing on Ukraine right now and there may be nuclear bombs by next week, I thought it would be safe to do Faure now. But then there was the announcement about Roe v. Wade. All one can say is... jesus I don't know what to say except that I already wrote this about Faure...
I once saw an interview with Colin Davis, who was asked why he always conducted Mozart from the very beginning of his career. He shrugged and said: "Mozart is life." The ebb and flow of life itself is what we look for in art. George Eliot, a hero of mine, put it like this: Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.
There's a musical level out there even past transcendence, the level where exists life itself. Mozart is life. Schubert and Brahms are life. Just as Chekhov and Flaubert and George Eliot are life. Just as Leonardo and Rembrandt and Courbet are life. Just as Jean Renoir and Yasijiro Ozu and Satayajit Ray and Vittorio de Sica are life. They are, quite simply, so real, that merely by experiencing what they create, that no matter how distant their universe, they give the impression that they've lived our lives.
There are some composers and artists who just can't do that, and probably deserve to be taken much less seriously than they are. Nobody can tell me that Richard Strauss or Liszt did not write the music of pretentious poseurs; just as nobody can tell me that's not equally true of everything from Hemingway to Kubrick to Bob Dylan... but some deserve to be taken so much more seriously. Thank God, Janacek is finally getting the attention he merits, and Carl Nielsen is hopefully not far behind. But we still have to come to terms with the staggering achievements of composers who honestly belong in the conversation as being fully equal to Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms - and are only not regarded so because they are not part of Austro-German line. There are plenty of transcendent composers, but then there are composers who are more than just transcendent. When I listen to Vaughan Williams, or Smetana, or Poulenc, or Scott Joplin, or Josef Suk, or Gyorgy Kurtag, or Henry Cowell, or Alfred Schnittke, or Gershwin and Kurt Weill, or Tom Waits and Randy Newman (shut the f*** up I don't want to hear it...) I know in my bones that this is some of the very greatest music ever written. Is it greater than, say, Stravinsky or Bartok? Well... Stravinsky... yeah probably. I love Petrushka and Les Noces as much as I love any music in the world, but Stravinsky has very little to say about being human. Whereas Vaughan Williams, over and over again, has music that probes so much deeper into the human heart. Stravinsky is not interested in 'people', he is interested in 'all people'; and just about every work of his is an investigation of community rituals. But in Scott Joplin, everything you need to know about the daily and private lives of the community which birthed his music is present in every beat and every chord.
But at the very top of that underrated list is Gabriel Faure. He is among the greatest of all composers, and he is so misunderstood. He is thought of as a composer of exquisite miniatures, when in fact his music is as much the texture of life itself as any of the major masters.
Insofar as one can rank greatness, then what makes Faure's music greater than... many other composers... is the inwardness of it. There is little to no 'effect.' Their ebb and flow is the nearest thing to life itself. It is music of pure substance. If they ever strain for effect, it is always to express a new emotional sentiment, and never just to make an impression.
Like Mozart and Chopin, Faure is usually sentimentalized, not just by listeners but by performers. Performers bathe in his beauty, with rubatos that linger on his exquisite effects and tempi often slower than the markings. But Faure, like Mozart, is perfectly constructed, and his music simply can't take any distention. Insofar as Faure has famous recordings, a lot of them make him sound like cocktail music.
And yet, this is music more complex than Chopin - who usually presents his emotions one at a time. Even in his smallest pieces, Faure presents many emotions all at once. He has that same multidimensional complexity in Mozart - for all its pleasant appearances, the depths are dark, acerbic, almost misanthropic. Even if today he's considered far too exquisite to be profound, he was considered a very difficult, modern composer in his own day. If he were generally played better, one would understand how challenging this music is. Even if tragedy is not on the surface, it is always present. Harmonically, Faure is just one step away from Debussy, but while Debussy deliberately avoids expressing things related to the human condition, Faure plunges as deeply into the human waters as Schubert. In many ways, Faure's truest heirs are Bill Evans, who is usually associated with Debussy, and Stephen Sondheim, who is usually associated with Ravel. Neither is a particularly accurate assessment. Debussy is not interested in the human, he is purely interested in the world of appearances with no concern for the human - while Ravel seems to believe that the appearance (or 'masque' per Adorno) is in fact the human. For all the drugs Evans did, his music is firmly rooted to the real world, and deeply interested in the problems of being human. And Sondheim? Well, what can you say except that he the greatest genius in the history of the American arts, perhaps with more to say about the human condition than any creator since Chekhov.
My old friend Steve Schwartz, for my money the best writer about classical music in English currently active, on the internet or off it, put Faure perfectly: "Unlike his contemporaries, Fauré avoids standard harmonies, employing instead a modal style, with a leaning toward enharmonic, rather than functional modulations. It's been called a "side-slipping" style and allows Fauré to quickly get to remote keys and back again. Standard modulations tended to lead the listener through a series of logically-linked aural "doors": you can hear where you've come from and where you're going. With Fauré, the effect is more like a Star-Trek teleporter. Suddenly, you find yourself in a new place, far from your point of departure."
I suspect we are still waiting for an international pianist or singer to grant Faure the eminence his music deserves the way Igor Levit seems poised to do for Busoni. But this recording of Faure's complete nocturnes by Francois Dumont, a pianist I've never heard of, is quite a bit better than the usual classics mentioned. If you go to the score, Faure's tempi are faster than are generally played, his dynamic range wider. The exquisite sounds should always hold a place, but so should forward motion and passion. Within this music, when played quickly and dramatically enough, you hear Mozart's disguised misanthropy, Schubert's ocean of melancholy, and Brahms's frustration at the messiness of the human condition.
And with that comes Faure's own brand of eros in which hopes to be loved are continually frustrated as ideas are juxtaposed and bandied about one another in motivic and harmonic ways that seem almost like two partners constantly misunderstanding each other, denying dignity to each other, rejecting each other's wishes and humanity. Listen to that 'devil's staircase' of upsurging chromatic six-three chords in the ninth nocturne - it is the music of hopes generated that are never satisfied. Perhaps these are the 'teleportations' of which Steve wrote - in Mozart, you constantly feel found, in Faure, you constantly feel lost. If you want to truly understand the world of love, listen to Faure, not Chopin, because Faure understands that what makes life beautiful is the sadness of having to settle, of doing your best and still finding yourself acting in ways you know are stupid, of always being misunderstood even by the best-intentioned people, of little inlets of happiness amid constant struggle just to get through the day. All the grandiose Wagnerian achievements are not worth saving next to the documents of our daily human struggles. So the prettiness is just Faure's facade, but find the door, and there's a whole cathedral inside.
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