Fauré’s style

Beautiful lines Fauré’s early compositions reveal a special instinct for beauty and balance. In works such as the choral Cantique de Jean Racine and the solo piano Romances sans paroles, he perfectly blends melodiousness, restraint and sensuality. Early influences included Gounod, Mendelssohn and Saint-saëns (pictured below).

Plain and pure At the Niedermeyer School, Fauré studied Renaissance and earlier church music. He retained considerable fondness for these styles, once declaring he thought the church should use only plainsong. Their impact may partly account for his incantatory lines and modal inclinations.

Where’s Wagner? Fauré didn’t succumb to Wagner’s spell, but he did use Wagnerian techniques if and when he needed to – for instance, leitmotifs in his opera Pénélope. He visited the Bayreuth Festival and particularly admired Parsifal; his late style bears more than a few stamps of its spare, mystical qualities. Yet a greater influence was the pianistic writing of Liszt and Schumann.

Masterpieces of mystery Fauré’s ‘late’ style still flummoxes listeners: always questing, full of harmonic sleight-of-hand and slimmed down to the bare essentials. If they were the products of his internal world in the sonic isolation of deafness, the comparison with Beethoven is not inappropriate, much though he disliked the idea.