Composer

Notes:
Fauré
Poulenc
Szymanowski

Synopsis
Fauré
Poulenc
Szymanowski

Text:
Fauré
Poulenc
Szymanowski

Fauré Requiem

Fauré completed his Requiem in 1887, when he was forty-two. It was his first and only large-scale setting of a religious text. Behind him lay the popular Ballade for piano and orchestra, the two piano quartets, and numerous piano works and songs; ahead, most of his finest achievements, including the two piano quintets, the opera Penelope, and the later song cycles and a handful of short religious choral works over which the Requiem towers in solitary splendour - if that is not too extravagant a metaphor for this essay in dignified contemplation. The sad truth is that Fauré spent much of his life in official duties that gave him little pleasure. Small wonder then that in 1902 he could write to a friend, "That's how I see death: as a joyful deliverance, an aspiration towards a happiness beyond the grave, rather than as a painful experience"; or that the Requiem should reflect this point of view.

He seems to have begun it in the summer of 1887 and a first version, consisting of five movements with small orchestra, was given at the Madeleine church in Paris, where he was organist, on 16 January 1888 as part of a "first-class" funeral for a wealthy parishioner. The parish priest disapproved of such novelties but Fauré nonetheless went ahead and added the Offertory and the Libera me. Throughout the 1890s Fauré discussed the printing of the work with his publisher, Hamelle, and what forces should be employed, and eventually in 1900 a version for full symphony orchestra was heard, first in Lille and then in Paris (with 250 performers) as part of the Universal Exhibition.

It has been remarked that this is a requiem without the Last Judgment. Charles Koechlin in his book on the composer has noted "that the indulgent and fundamentally good nature of the master had as far as possible to turn from the implacable dogma of eternal punishment." The Requiem is not a specifically Christian work; nor is it a cry de profundis. Fauré has transformed the tensions of the traditional requiem, and given precedence to the human transcendence of suffering.