Lunchtime Lecture Recital: Graham Johnson, Sarah Fox and Florian Stortz
2024 marks the centenary year of Gabriel Fauré’s death. His career as a composer of songs for voice and piano traverses six decades (1862-1921); almost the whole history of French mélodie is contained within these parameters.
In the 1860s Fauré, the lifelong protégé of Camille Saint-Saëns, was a suavely precocious student; he was part of Pauline Viardot’s circle in the 1870s and he nearly married her daughter. Pointed in the direction of symbolist poetry by Robert de Montesquiou in 1886, Fauré was the favoured composer from the early 1890s of Winnaretta Singer, later Princesse de Polignac, and his songs were revered by Marcel Proust. In 1905 he became director of the Paris Conservatoire, and he composed his most profound music in old age. His existence, steadily productive and outwardly imperturbable, was undermined by self-doubt, an unhappy marriage and a tragic loss of hearing.
This lecture recital, given by the great Graham Johnson, will prove that Fauré is no longer merely a ‘Master of Charms’ circumscribed by the belle époque.