Welcome to a historic occasion at the Bayerische Staatsoper! Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a cellist, sometimes an author, and a passionate devotee of the music of Gabriel Fauré, whom I consider to be one of the finest, most distinctive – and most under-rated – composers of all time. His music has accompanied me throughout my professional and personal life; and I am also fascinated by Fauré the man. Quite why he has been such a strong presence for me – almost like an absent godfather – I would find hard to explain. Suffice it to say that his music speaks to me and deeply stirs my emotions - to the extent that my son Gabriel is named after him! Last year, for the centenary of Fauré’s death, a group of my closest musical colleagues and I (referring to ourselves, privately, as ‘Team Fauré’) took over the Wigmore Hall in London for five successive nights in order to perform his complete chamber music, alongside some relevant works by his teacher Camille Saint-Saëns and his pupils Maurice Ravel and George Enescu. We all emerged from the experience transformed, refreshed – and more than ever convinced that Fauré was one of the truly great composers.

What is so special about his music, engendering such fanatical devotion in his followers? After all, his works, with a few exceptions, are on the whole less well-known than those of his (fairly) near contemporaries Claude Debussy and Ravel. It’s true that both of those masters were more outwardly iconoclastic, and also more natural orchestrators; but that does not make them more original, nor greater masters of form – and certainly not more profound composers. (Fauré himself enquired, in a marvellous letter to the pianist Alfred Cortot, why the latter performed the music of Debussy and Ravel more than his own. If Cortot considered them to be greater composers than him, Fauré suggested, Cortot was being ‘more modest on my behalf than I am myself.’) There are essential differences between Fauré and his two younger colleagues. A glib explanation would be that Fauré was a classicist, Debussy and Ravel impressionists; but that does scant justice to any of the three. There is, however, a small kernel of truth to it. Where Debussy and Ravel to a certain extent tended to dispense with established genres, often referring to extra-musical notions in their works, Fauré rarely strayed away from traditional forms; apart from his songs, almost all of his works bear conventional titles – sonatas, quintets, nocturnes, etc – with no subtitles. His music doesn’t need any verbal descriptions. One can bring a sensibility to painting, to sculpture, to literature, in order to understand some aspects, at least, of the works of Debussy and Ravel; with Fauré – despite his frequent setting of texts – it is the music that reigns, that holds the secret to his meaning. He also tends to avoid the modal harmonies from Eastern cultures that so fascinated Debussy and Ravel; Fauré’s language is for the most part strictly tonal – albeit within his own uniquely imaginative and bold version of tonality.

So in some ways a classicist – a puritan, even; an idealist, certainly: Fauré’s stated aim was to show us through his art a world better than our own. But within the self-imposed limits of the forms he chose, his originality, while never self-aggrandising, is nothing short of breathtaking – in terms of structure, harmony and atmosphere. Occasionally he would announce to a friend: ‘I have created an entirely new form’ – and indeed he had. His rewriting of classical structures produced some extraordinary, unique shapes and proportions – while never sacrificing the clarity that was so integral a component of his art. Fascinating as these innovations are, they can be challenging for the performer; Fauré’s music requires intense dedication and discipline. Similarly, his use of tonality blends an intense respect for classical rules with a soaring freedom, stretching those rules to the edge of possibility. His constant shifting between different keys can sound restless, feverish even; but it should never be incomprehensible. Communicating the inevitable logic and glorious precision of his harmonic language is part of the task of his interpreters.

And therein, I believe, lies one of the reasons for the comparative neglect of Fauré’s music – particularly the works of his later years. It seems that performers of Fauré need to understand (and love) every aspect of his style. They also need to master a rare art, that of true legato – by which I mean not flat lines, but unbroken contours that rise and fall with each phrase in perfect shapes, following the lines of Fauré’s musical thought. His works also require a special sensitivity to colours – each passing tonality should be accorded its own timbre, atmosphere. His rapid journeys through a variety of keys sometimes remind me of a walk through a beautiful forest, with different shades of light illuminating each tree. This, alongside the startlingly daring nature of his harmonic language, is perhaps the most frequently misunderstood aspect of Fauré’s late style; even his boyhood teacher – and lifelong friend and father-figure – Saint-Saëns complained about it in Pénélope: ‘I can’t reach that state of mind which accepts never settling in any key or looks with equanimity upon consecutive fifths and sevenths and on chords helplessly waiting for a resolution that never comes.’ At one point Saint-Saëns even demanded to know whether his former student had gone mad! Well, teachers whose pupils have developed in ways they cannot fathom will often make such complaints …

So in a way, Fauré had the worst of all worlds: his originality, while not screaming for attention like the shocking innovations of, say, Igor Strawinsky’s Le sacre du printemps – the scandal of whose premiere, just a few weeks after that of Pénélope, damagingly eclipsed the quieter success of Fauré’s work – still managed to baffle many of his contemporary listeners; while many superficial critics, because of the subtlety of Fauré’s innovations, managed to overlook them altogether, falsely accusing Fauré of conventionality. No comment …

Like many great composers, Fauré honed and refined his art as he grew older, moving towards a more meaningful simplicity, dispensing with the luxurious sensuality of his early music and aiming for a deeper translucency. The purity of the arts of the ancient Greeks became a focus for him – hence his choice of Penelope, the wife of King Odysseu (Ulysses in Roman mythology), for his only opera, and Prometheus, bearer of fire to mankind, for his largest choral work. (The latter Tragédie lyrique Prométhée incidentally, a vast-scale production – with thirteen harpists at the front of the stage! – written some years before Pénélope, provided Fauré with what was probably the greatest public success of his lifetime. So sad that it is now all but forgotten.) Fauré’s musical trajectory can remind us in some ways of that of Beethoven – and for a similar reason: both composers suffered from increasingly acute deafness, forcing them to retreat into worlds previously unseen, or rather unheard. This, of course, is not to imply that the magical beauty of Fauré’s earlier works – the Requiem, for instance, or the first violin sonata – is absent in the later music, any more than the beauty and energy of Beethoven’s earlier works are missing from his last string quartets. There are still themes, modulations, colours in the works of Fauré’s maturity that make one gasp at their sheer gorgeousness; but this beauty is not an end in itself – it is an essential part of a journey towards a far greater whole. (Just to be clear: Pénélope, composed when Fauré was in his 60s, can be said to belong to his late style, even though that style was to be even further refined in his final chamber works.)

For a long time, Fauré was belittled as essentially a composer of miniatures – a salon composer, in fact. Thankfully, that ridiculous aspersion has been mostly withdrawn in recent years. Some of Fauré’s smaller-scale music was indeed premiered in the great salons of Paris, and with its subtlety and essential intimacy sits perhaps better in a room rather than a large hall; but that is the case with virtually all chamber music. And the fact that the music speaks rather than shouts does not mean that it is any way emotionally restricted – far from it. At any rate, a ‘salon composer’ could not have written Pénélope! Like Richard Wagner – and Robert Schumann, a composer whom Fauré venerated, and who had a strong influence on his musical life – Fauré was attracted to myth. In fact, he knew Wagner’s operas well; he went to Bayreuth, imbibing it all, and afterwards producing an amusing ‘pièce d’occasion’, a piano duet entitled Souvenirs de Bayreuth with his friend André Messager (another composer whose music deserves more exposure, by the bye). But Fauré was no Wagnerian, even if he learned from the older master. For all his adherence to German forms, Fauré’s ethos, his aesthetic, is essentially French. When I was first studying Fauré’s works as a teenager, my cello teacher Jane Cowan, as an aid to understanding the particular nature of French music in general (and Fauré’s in particular), wrote into my study-book a poem by Fauré’s friend Paul Verlaine containing the lines:

De la musique avant toute chose …
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air …
De la musique encore et toujours !
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

“Que ton vers soit la chose envolée” – “Let yours be the verse that soars”: there is definitely something of this to Fauré’s art. His music – no matter how dark its subject – seeks to uplift, to enhance, never to depress. He shares with us joys, tragedies of all kinds – but never his personal struggles; his music moves us deeply, but never leaves us feeling miserable. We feel the man, certainly; but, as with the music of the baroque and classical periods, Fauré’s art, while expressing all imaginable shades of emotion, is always clothed in beauty, nobility.

This aesthetic makes Penelope, a story taken from Homer’s Odyssey. a perfect subject for Fauré. The narrative gives him the scope for a vast range of moods, but at one remove from everyday life. Being a story of Greek heroism, it is not surprising that the initial impression is one of bold, exciting drama. (Interestingly, he re-used a theme from the opera, depicting Ulysses’ wrath, for the urgently dramatic opening of his first cello sonata, written a few years later.) This aspect is just one part of the attraction of the work, however; Fauré the powerful dramatist (perhaps seeking quite consciously to combat his reputation as a gentle miniaturist) is perfectly balanced within the opera by the lyrical Fauré we know and love. We are enchanted by melting declarations of passion, paeans to the beauties of nature. There are even moments of eroticism (not unusual in Fauré’s music, in fact – he manages often to combine the sacred and the erotic in a uniquely compelling way). If the story itself requires a little more suspension of disbelief than would be ideal – what opera does not? – the emotions within it are vividly realistic. Each different character in the opera has her/his own musical language; the cold arrogance of the suitors’ music has nothing in common with the anguished sensitivity of Pénélope’s arias, or the noble strength of Ulysses’ utterances. Which is not to say that the characters are musically two-dimensional – far from it. All the main roles require emotional fluctuations that make them believably human; and even among the various suitors – basically a pack of scoundrels – there are striking differences in characterisation. It is a thoroughly convincing work, in fact, one that combines its many different elements into a satisfyingly unified whole. Fauré’s stated aim (for an earlier operatic project that in the end came to nothing, but which no doubt applies also to Pénélope) was ‘to translate human feelings through music that surpasses what is human.’ In that, I feel – and I hope that you will feel – that he succeeds completely. And I am very grateful to the Bayerische Staatsoper for their belief in the greatness of this opera, for taking the risk of presenting a work that is off the beaten track – an act of faith that is richly justified.

Ideally this production would produce a whole host of newly-converted Fauré fanatics whose task henceforth would be to roam the world with no aim other than that of converting others to Gabriel’s magical world! But perhaps more realistically: I’m hoping to see a production that serves both the music and the drama with the sort of outward simplicity and dignity that was Fauré’s ideal – and Homer’s. I have no idea whether it is a weakness in Fauré, or just a special quality: but his later music (like the later music of his hero Schumann) seems to need from its interpreters an especially intense commitment, a burning desire to communicate its meaning. For those of us who have fallen under its spell, Fauré’s singular enchantment ensnares us almost like a religion – for all its complete lack of pretension, its humility and directness, this music is sacred.