Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics

A wide-ranging study of Fauré and his contemporaries.

Carlo Caballero (Author)

9780521543989, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 March 2004

348 pages, 2 tables 26 music examples
24.6 x 18.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.62 kg

'… stimulating … it is hard to imagine that this finely researched, well produced and wide ranging study will not significantly enrich the reader's experience of Fauré's music. … this book broadens the perspective not only laterally, as it were, exploring the influences, ethics and perspectives that shaped Fauré's own environment, but upwards, chronologically speaking, taking in the heritage of the composer and his cultural milieu as it affected such non-Fauréan figures as Stravinsky, Varèse, Messiaen and particularly Boulez.' Piano

This wide-ranging study of Gabriel Fauré and his contemporaries reclaims aesthetic categories crucial to French musical life in the early twentieth century. Its interrelated chapters treat the topics of sincerity, originality, novelty, self-renewal, homogeneity and religious belief in relation to Fauré's music and ideas. Taking a broad view of cultural life during the composer's lifetime and beyond, the book moves between specific details in Fauré's music and related critical, literary and philosophical issues, ranging from Gounod to Boulez and from Proust to Valéry. Above all, the book connects abstract values to artistic choices and thus places such works as Fauré's Requiem, La bonne chanson, La chanson d'Eve, L'horizon chimérique, and the chamber music in a new light.

Introduction
1. The question of sincerity
2. Innovation, tradition
3. Originality, influence, and self-renewal
4. Homogeneity: meanings, risks, and consequences
5. Fauré's religion: ideas and music
6. Fauré the elusive.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Literary theory [DSA], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6]