Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 07/10/2011, uploaded on 09/01/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Heading into the later decades of the 19^th century, opera dominated French musical life to the point of stifling outlets for other forms of music and making it difficult for young composers to attract attention to their own works. Thus, in 1871, Camille Saint-Saëns cofounded the Société Nationale de Musique with the purpose of promoting new French music and increasing the presence of chamber and symphonic music in French culture. With this new outlet open to emerging composers, a younger generation helped reshape the direction of French music. One such composer and piece to benefit from the Société Nationale was Saint-Saëns’s friend and former pupil, Gabriel Fauré and his First Piano Quartet.

The quartet was begun in the summer of 1876, not long before his engagement to Marieanne Viardot, daughter of the famous singer Pauline Viardot, after five years of courtship. This hopeful and optimistic time perhaps factors into the quartet’s generally blissful temperament, despite its minor key signature. However, the engagement was short lived, and the composer’s heart was broken when Marieanne broke it off after only four months, which likely influenced the dejected tone of the third movement Adagio. The quartet was finished in 1879. It received its premiere at the Société Nationale on February 14, 1880 with Fauré at the piano. The original finale was not well received. Submitting to outside opinion, Fauré revised the movement, and the original has since been lost.

Cast in the traditional four-movement design, Fauré’s First Piano Quartet is a brilliant display of his understanding of Classical structure. The first movement is a well-conceived sonata movement and, in its C minor tonality, bears virtually no resemblance to the stormy incarnations of the key one so easily associates with Beethoven. Instead, a twilight glow beams from the music. The Scherzo and Trio second movement is a rare virtuosic piece from Fauré’s pen as the composer typically avoided ostentatious instrumental displays. As mentioned before, the Adagio third movement is pervaded by an immense sadness and resignation. Yet, there is restraint in the composer’s outpourings and the emotionalism of the movement never breaks its conventional ternary design. The quick-paced finale begins in the tonic of C minor, with a secondary idea in E-flat major, but ultimately yields to the major modality and comes to a brilliant close in C major.      Joseph DuBose

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.