Fauré: Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor, Op. 45

Claude Debussy once dubbed his fellow Frenchman Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) “the master of charms.” That may hold true for many of his songs, and for early chamber works like the A-major Violin Sonata (1875–76) and the C-minor Piano Quartet (1919–21). But there is nothing so immediately charming about the powerful, often strenuous Second Piano Quartet, composed in 1885–86 during a period when depression (or “spleen,” as he dubbed it) brought Fauré close to nervous collapse. We know nothing about the quartet's gestation, only that the premiere took place in Paris on January 22, 1887, with the composer playing the piano part.

Introduction

With the exception of his very last work, the String Quartet, Op. 121, Fauré’s published chamber works all include the piano, his own instrument; and, in the G-minor piano quartet, it is very much the dominant instrument. It leads every movement, and, in the entire four-movement work, there are a mere 11 bars in which it is silent. Admittedly much of the piano writing is texture, harmonic support, or ornamental brilliance. Fauré is less inclined than the German masters to integrate the piano fully with the strings, which often play in unison against a piano background. The overriding feeling of the quartet as a whole is of a passionate expression, borne along on a wave of irresistible energy—with pauses for refection—but halted only by an Adagio that, at its outset, calls the entire certainty of forward movement into question.

History

The highly individual character of Fauré’s music reflects the complicated chain of influences that fed it. He never attended the Paris Conservatoire (though he became its director in 1905, when he was 60). Instead, he went to the École Niedermeyer, where the emphasis was on the study of Gregorian chant and Catholic church music, especially Renaissance polyphony. However, the piano class was taught by Camille Saint-Saëns, who drew mainly on the Romantic piano school and the music of Richard Wagner. Fauré was himself an admirer of Wagner and attended the Bayreuth Festival (a festival dedicated to the performance of Wagner’s music). But as a church organist he also acquired—and, to some extent, applied to his own musical thinking—certain procedures that, partly for practical reasons, digressed from good academic practice. Organists learn to harmonize on the spot and become tolerant of informal routes from key to key (and back again). They have in their ears the old church modes (scales) as much as modern tonality, and are happy to mix the two in strange and interesting ways as they improvise in the unplanned spaces of the long High Mass ceremony. Such processes can already be heard in the main first-movement theme of Fauré’s G-minor piano quartet.

Fauré: Quartet No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 45

Form

The four movements are broadly cyclic—not so much in the near-literal recurrence of themes as in a certain family resemblance between them. This gives the work a strong overall coherence, even though Fauré’s approach to Classical form is at times quite episodic. For instance, the exposition of the sonata-form first movement (“Allegro molto moderato”) comes virtually to a full stop before proceeding to the development section. The second movement, on the other hand, is a breathless scherzo in C minor (“Allegro molto”), cast as a single span. The at times almost motionless slow movement, (“Adagio non troppo,” in E-flat major), is a rhapsody on its opening materials, with an abbreviated recapitulation. The “Allegro molto” finale—a slightly frantic waltz in G minor—is in a loose sonata form, with an incisive codetta (concluding) theme that eventually dominates the final pages of the work.

Analysis

Fauré’s technique with sonata-type forms is basically linear. As hinted above, the long opening theme of the first movement, played in unison by all three string instruments over bustling piano arpeggios, is a fine example of the method: though clearly in G minor, it tends to wander from the key, through what seem random sideslips, onto notes that might imply modulation, but are in fact merely colorings or small digressions. When it nevertheless ends up in G minor, in time for the piano version of the theme, there is a mild sense of relief, even an element of surprise—the opposite of the Classical idea of surprising us by ending up somewhere else. On a larger scale, the technique gives a certain rhapsodic quality to the form, even though the music is actually carefully designed and works through the normal principles of contrast and repetition.

The same kind of thinking sometimes affects the music’s rhythm, and very strikingly so in the slow third movement. The time signature here is 9/8—a compound time signature of three beats in the bar with three eighth notes for each beat. But Fauré divides the opening piano solo into quarter notes, with the last one of each measure tied across the barline (marking them with accents to make sure the players don’t try to soften the effect), so that we actually hear four two-beat bars with an extension (instead of two three-beat bars). The arithmetic is simple enough, but the musical effect when the viola enters with a melody clearly in 9/8 time is subtly unsettling. It’s as if Fauré wants to create a confusion which he can (and does) then resolve in the course of the movement.

There are similar rhythmic complexities in the finale, but the music flies past so quickly that they register merely as intricacies within a straightforward, rapid triple-time meter. (Fauré shows an impressive ability to create long-limbed music at very high speed.) The brilliant effect of the codetta theme (piano chords) is due to skillful timing—a clear sense of the need to insert a formal marker amid the flurry of notes. The scherzo second movement, on the other hand, is an unbroken, three-minute dash. The rhythms here, too, are intricate, with cross-rhythms in the pizzicato (plucked) strings and hidden syncopations in the fast-moving piano quarter notes, which blur the meter and keep the ear (not, one hopes, the pianist) guessing.

Critical Thoughts

In Paris, unlike in any German city, the twin focus of music was the opera house and the church. The French tended to think in stories or in liturgy. Instrumental music was a side issue—typically, the Prix de Rome, the big Conservatoire composition prize (which, of course, Fauré never won), was awarded for a cantata. Fauré’s own Requiem (1887–90) is deservedly well-known, and he also composed a couple of operas that are not; but by far his most significant vocal writing was in song, and there is often a vocal quality about his melodic writing for instruments. Perhaps this helps explain the way his harmonies tend to follow the melody, rather than the other way around. And it also perhaps explains why his sonata forms feel less architectural, and more discursive, than those of, say, Robert Schumann or Johannes Brahms.

Legacy

Fauré never studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but he taught there, taking over Jules Massenet’s composition class in 1896. His pupils included Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger, and since Nadia was herself a highly influential teacher of composers and pianists, it would be reasonable to suppose that Fauré’s influence carried through in that discreet way. The influence of his music on other composers is less apparent. In his day it was thought rather complicated and esoteric, and in his last years, after World War I, he was still writing in an enriched version of the style he had perfected in his two piano quartets of 30 and 40 years earlier—at a time when Paris was in thrall to the antics of the French polymath Jean Cocteau and his followers, the composers known collectively as Les Six, whose music explicitly rejected everything Fauré’s works had stood for.

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Article by Stephen Walsh