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queenluaWhen, in the course of human events, one reads a little bit too much of Marilynne Robinson's incredible prose, and then plays a little bit too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and thus gets the two very different types of work all muddled in one's head, and is thus seized with the need to go spit out many thousands of words of Clair-Obscur-fanfiction-in-the-style-of-Marilynne-Robinson, but becomes aware partway through the project that one's understanding of the culture and structure of the Paris Conservatory during the Belle Époque era is incredibly thin, and this lack of understanding is really becoming awkward given that one has gone and invented an entire subplot involving multiple professors at aforementioned conservatory in one's fanfiction based on a passing mention in canon that "oh such-and-such character went to conservatory" and literally nothing else—well, it thus becomes necessary to go read a well-regarded biography of a contemporaneous French composer to amend that lack of knowledge.
Which is how I found myself reading Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux (translated by Roger Nichols).
("You really have a knack for nerd-sniping yourself," a friend observed dryly when I explained my present pitiable state of affairs. Yeah I sure do, huh.)
As I've been reading this primarily for convoluted fanfiction research purposes, what follows should not be construed as a review or anything even approaching one (I haven't even finished reading the book yet!), but, more of a... thinking-aloud session? Because there's a great deal that's amused me, and also a great deal that's made me very ponderous, and also stuff that just straight-up confused me (recall my aforementioned staggering lack of historical/contextual knowledge)... and yeah the only way I know how to think these days is via blog posts, apparently.
* STUFF THAT'S AMUSED ME: God this author is so OPINIONATED and JUDGY that I cannot help but be entertained. One gets the sense this Nectoux guy is the kind of dude to get into a cab and start shouting at the driver if he hears a single chord of Top 40 Hits over the radio.
Here's a choice scathing rant about church music during Fauré's time (emphases mine):
Here's the author getting pissy over Showy Technically-Complicated Pieces via scarequotes:
Here's a funny bit talking about how much Fauré's day job sucked:
"Innocently execrable" is such a sick burn haha. (Gives me the same kind of vibes as contemporary Christian rock, actually? History sure repeats itself.)
Also, there's a hilarious bit where the author spends a while ruthlessly laying out what he perceives as all the technical flaws in Fauré's La Naissance de Vénus op. 29 ("the banality of his bass monologue is unfortunately surpassed in the interminable final chorus"), only to be like, "why the fuck didn't Fauré realize his own work was shitty":
I didn't have to hunt particularly hard to find passages like this. This author is salty, like, all the time. Admittedly I believe him to some extent, right. I'm not one of those "oh literally all art is equivalently good & people who think some stuff is better than other stuff are just Snobby Elitist Assholes" types. Probably there was a lot of dreck! But it's funny how rarely he feels the need to justify his aesthetic judgments or qualify them with, like, supporting evidence from contemporaneous music critics or anything like that. It's just like "here was a lot of GARBAGE, ugh, source: just look at it jfc." (But then again, like, what kind of person sets out to write 500+ exhaustively researched pages about an only-somewhat-notable composer? Probably a guy with Extremely Strong Aesthetic Opinions, haha.)
* STUFF THAT'S MADE ME PONDEROUS: Reading the story of this guy's life, one gets a sense of how much of creative success is not just being in the right place in the right time, but also, matching one's output to a shape that is legible to whatever audience you're aiming to impress. Like, a lot of Fauré's early success comes in the form of songs and chamber music pieces, performed at salons for niche, upper-class, highly-refined audiences. Which is great for him, but it's kind of equivalent of landing some SF/F short stories in Clarkesworld and developing a small, passionate fanbase on that basis. People admire him, and some of those are even people with taste and influence, and some of them help fund his little Patreon to keep him writing new stuff, but... it's not the kind of work that'll land you a permanent place in the canon, right? Like, metaphorically speaking, no one has won the Astounding Award on the basis of short fiction since 2018; it's all about novels. He's aware of this, and tries to produce an opera, which is the kind of big showpiece that would potentially claim him widespread acclaim... but it gets stuck in the Belle Époque equivalent of production hell (apparently securing a libretto to use was a huge complicated deal? and even once he got that there were further setbacks).
And also... he's not trying that hard, right. He's really bad about getting projects to "done" in a timely fashion, and sometimes bad about getting them done at all, and he gets huffy about efforts by his publisher to make his stuff more marketable:
And he's also charmingly, relatably timid and self-doubting in some ways—when, after the premiere of a sonata, he receives tons of praise, but a few of his musical friends critique the last movement somewhat, he's so upset that he only sent the first three movements to the publisher and spent the next three years reworking the finale to his satisfaction.
All this timidity, languidity, and so forth means that Fauré only really achieves widespread success and notoriety later in life. And you're happy for him when it happens—he's been working hard and grinding it out that whole time, albeit in his own circuitous fashion—but also, man, if not for his big famous mentor Saint-Saëns persistently goading him along, and if not for the rich people he was able to lean on from time to time for summer retreat houses, and occasional loans, and all of that... well, I think he goes down in history as a church organist and an administrator and that's about it.
Like, damn, things really just are so contingent in life, huh. Not that that's news to me, but it's interesting how affecting it is when laid out in biography form.
(And that's without touching how canons continue to develop and all that. Like, I get the impression that this Fauré guy is somewhat better-known in France, but even so, I'd never heard of him until I set out on this harebrained fanfiction research quest, and I'm not a hardcore classical music person but I go to a few orchestra concerts a year and definitely know more than the average person, right. His student, Ravel, and his mentor, Saint-Saëns, both loom decidedly larger.)
* STUFF THAT'S CONFUSING TO ME: This biographer really likes to play fast-and-loose with "blithe, sweeping claims about National Character," in a way that strikes me very weird? Like, I feel like if this were written in the nineteenth century, that'd be par for the course, but this biography was originally published in 1991, by which time I thought that type of historiography was considered pretty sloppy? Not that there's no place for attributing a certain character/style to some nation as a shorthand kind of deal—e.g. "magical realism emerged in the postcolonial context in such-and-such nations for such-and-such reasons," or "spirituals are a uniquely American form of music that were sung by Black slaves in the US south during the antebellum period"—like, that sort of description pointing to a real, specific locus where a particular type of work emerges and develops, and seems very valid to me. But this author will dash off stuff to the effect of "the decidedly Germanic chord structure" when describing some piece of music, with no further context or elaboration, and I'll be like. Wait did Germany own those chords or something? Was Germany even a fucking country yet? Also: the artistic cultures of these European countries were all very much in conversation with each other at the time so, uh, what exactly makes this more German than just modern or European or whatnot? What is happening here lmao.
I mean, I'm not the target audience for the book so maybe I'm missing context, and maybe these throwaway references mean something more specific and technical than I realize, but it just feels like bumping my knee against a table leg every time I run into it haha.
(What does make sense in context, in a kind of depressing way, is how much the specter of nationalism hangs over this time period. It's not a theme the author is primarily interested in, but there'll be these throwaway references to stuff like, such-and-such music society was founded after the Franco-Prussian War to promote "French music", as distinct from the "Germanic tradition," and it'll include quotes from music reviewers using anything-other-than-French as a synonym for "excreable" and French as a synonym for "good and holy and just"... and when you know World War I is coming down the pipeline it's just like hnnnngh God all these nationalisms feel so contrived and fake and arbitrary and very rapidly hurtling toward disaster!!!)
Anyway. That's what I've been reading lately. God knows what I'll nerd-snipe myself with next.
Oh, also, one last funny bit about the translation: there's a bunch of words that are left with the French spelling, for no particular reason I can discern? The funniest of these is "rôle," which is always spelled the French way, even though there is no semantic difference to be had there. Whatcha trying to prove with that little hat over the O, lol. Though I guess The New Yorker still spells coordinate and cooperate as "coördinate" and "coöperate" so. I guess we all have our little spelling hangups :P
Which is how I found myself reading Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux (translated by Roger Nichols).
("You really have a knack for nerd-sniping yourself," a friend observed dryly when I explained my present pitiable state of affairs. Yeah I sure do, huh.)
As I've been reading this primarily for convoluted fanfiction research purposes, what follows should not be construed as a review or anything even approaching one (I haven't even finished reading the book yet!), but, more of a... thinking-aloud session? Because there's a great deal that's amused me, and also a great deal that's made me very ponderous, and also stuff that just straight-up confused me (recall my aforementioned staggering lack of historical/contextual knowledge)... and yeah the only way I know how to think these days is via blog posts, apparently.
* STUFF THAT'S AMUSED ME: God this author is so OPINIONATED and JUDGY that I cannot help but be entertained. One gets the sense this Nectoux guy is the kind of dude to get into a cab and start shouting at the driver if he hears a single chord of Top 40 Hits over the radio.
Here's a choice scathing rant about church music during Fauré's time (emphases mine):
To appreciate Niedermeyer's boldness we only have to hear the ridiculously naïve and banal stuff churned out at that same period by Aflred Lefébure-Wély on the organ of the Madeleine; his repertoire shows the depths to which religious music had fallen by succumbing to the infectious influence of the theatre. We can nowadays hardly imagine the extent to which the theatre dominated musical life, nor was it always the best theatre music that found its way into the churches. If these degenerate practices were to be rooted out, reforms had to take place in the training of organists and choirmasters—a necessity already identified by Choron.
Here's the author getting pissy over Showy Technically-Complicated Pieces via scarequotes:
The concert platform was given over to the worst excesses of virtuosity. Violinists and particularly pianists drew the crowds by their technical prowess, polishing off works rather like circus performers, greatly to the detriment of music. The repertoire consisted entirely of caprices and brilliant fantasies on popular Italian arias, 'bravura' variations and sundry 'galops' and 'grand concert studies'. The vogue for descriptive music was unabated, pursuing the most tiresome precedents of the late eighteenth century.
Here's a funny bit talking about how much Fauré's day job sucked:
We must realise that for a musician of Fauré's gifts his duties at the Madeleine were a real penance. The decorative, worldly atmosphere of the ritual and the clergy's innocently execrable taste when it came to music were hardly encouraging and further reinforced his philosophical scepticism.
"Innocently execrable" is such a sick burn haha. (Gives me the same kind of vibes as contemporary Christian rock, actually? History sure repeats itself.)
Also, there's a hilarious bit where the author spends a while ruthlessly laying out what he perceives as all the technical flaws in Fauré's La Naissance de Vénus op. 29 ("the banality of his bass monologue is unfortunately surpassed in the interminable final chorus"), only to be like, "why the fuck didn't Fauré realize his own work was shitty":
Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that he never repudiated this occasional work. The original version with piano was published and he had it played not just by the Société chorale d'amateurs (7 March 1883) but also at the Société nationale de musique (3 April 1886). He orchestrated it in 1895 and this version was given by Edouard Colonne (1 December 1895) and then—the final accoldate—at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire (5 February 1899). He himself conducted it in 8 October 1989 with a choir of 400 at the Leeds FEstival in an English version by his pupil Adela Maddison and, furthermore, he chose this minor work to represent him at the festival of French music which opened the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (2 April 1913), a month before the Paris premiére of Pénélope!
I didn't have to hunt particularly hard to find passages like this. This author is salty, like, all the time. Admittedly I believe him to some extent, right. I'm not one of those "oh literally all art is equivalently good & people who think some stuff is better than other stuff are just Snobby Elitist Assholes" types. Probably there was a lot of dreck! But it's funny how rarely he feels the need to justify his aesthetic judgments or qualify them with, like, supporting evidence from contemporaneous music critics or anything like that. It's just like "here was a lot of GARBAGE, ugh, source: just look at it jfc." (But then again, like, what kind of person sets out to write 500+ exhaustively researched pages about an only-somewhat-notable composer? Probably a guy with Extremely Strong Aesthetic Opinions, haha.)
* STUFF THAT'S MADE ME PONDEROUS: Reading the story of this guy's life, one gets a sense of how much of creative success is not just being in the right place in the right time, but also, matching one's output to a shape that is legible to whatever audience you're aiming to impress. Like, a lot of Fauré's early success comes in the form of songs and chamber music pieces, performed at salons for niche, upper-class, highly-refined audiences. Which is great for him, but it's kind of equivalent of landing some SF/F short stories in Clarkesworld and developing a small, passionate fanbase on that basis. People admire him, and some of those are even people with taste and influence, and some of them help fund his little Patreon to keep him writing new stuff, but... it's not the kind of work that'll land you a permanent place in the canon, right? Like, metaphorically speaking, no one has won the Astounding Award on the basis of short fiction since 2018; it's all about novels. He's aware of this, and tries to produce an opera, which is the kind of big showpiece that would potentially claim him widespread acclaim... but it gets stuck in the Belle Époque equivalent of production hell (apparently securing a libretto to use was a huge complicated deal? and even once he got that there were further setbacks).
And also... he's not trying that hard, right. He's really bad about getting projects to "done" in a timely fashion, and sometimes bad about getting them done at all, and he gets huffy about efforts by his publisher to make his stuff more marketable:
After [two song cycles, Fauré] came back to the Quintet 'with the firm intention not to leave it until it's finished', as he wrote in June 1894 to the Princesse de Polignac. [His publisher] Hamelle announced the work as 'to appear shortly' in the spring of 1896 and allotted to it the opus number 60... which was never used because once again the Quintet was put on one side. It eventually needed three summer holidays of intense and arduous work in Switzerland from 1903 to 1905 before Fauré could pronounce it finished.
The Elégie was a great success as soon as it appeared and Hamelle soon asked Fauré for another virtuoso cello piece to complement it. The composer complied but without much enthusiasm—virtuosity for its own sake left him cold. He wrote the brilliant scherzos of the Frist Violin Sonata and the First Piano Quartet only because he felt they were necessary to preserve an overall balance within the works concerned. A commission to write a virtuoso work had, in his view, no musical justification, and the results were always uninspired. Papillon is a case in point. Fauré also had arguments with Hamelle about the title: the composer wanted to call it Piéce pour violoncello, the publisher, with an eye on sales, preferre dLibellules (Dragonflies), which appears on the contract dated 14 September 1884. Hamelle had to wait fourteen years before Fauré would agree to it being published as Papillon, and even then the composer was angry: 'Butterfly or dungfly', he declared in exasperation, 'call it whatever you like.' Once again, Hamelle's instinct was right. As Papillon, the piece was played by 'cellists the length and breadth of France, though such is the inventive poverty behind all the agitation that I find this success hard to understand.
And he's also charmingly, relatably timid and self-doubting in some ways—when, after the premiere of a sonata, he receives tons of praise, but a few of his musical friends critique the last movement somewhat, he's so upset that he only sent the first three movements to the publisher and spent the next three years reworking the finale to his satisfaction.
All this timidity, languidity, and so forth means that Fauré only really achieves widespread success and notoriety later in life. And you're happy for him when it happens—he's been working hard and grinding it out that whole time, albeit in his own circuitous fashion—but also, man, if not for his big famous mentor Saint-Saëns persistently goading him along, and if not for the rich people he was able to lean on from time to time for summer retreat houses, and occasional loans, and all of that... well, I think he goes down in history as a church organist and an administrator and that's about it.
Like, damn, things really just are so contingent in life, huh. Not that that's news to me, but it's interesting how affecting it is when laid out in biography form.
(And that's without touching how canons continue to develop and all that. Like, I get the impression that this Fauré guy is somewhat better-known in France, but even so, I'd never heard of him until I set out on this harebrained fanfiction research quest, and I'm not a hardcore classical music person but I go to a few orchestra concerts a year and definitely know more than the average person, right. His student, Ravel, and his mentor, Saint-Saëns, both loom decidedly larger.)
* STUFF THAT'S CONFUSING TO ME: This biographer really likes to play fast-and-loose with "blithe, sweeping claims about National Character," in a way that strikes me very weird? Like, I feel like if this were written in the nineteenth century, that'd be par for the course, but this biography was originally published in 1991, by which time I thought that type of historiography was considered pretty sloppy? Not that there's no place for attributing a certain character/style to some nation as a shorthand kind of deal—e.g. "magical realism emerged in the postcolonial context in such-and-such nations for such-and-such reasons," or "spirituals are a uniquely American form of music that were sung by Black slaves in the US south during the antebellum period"—like, that sort of description pointing to a real, specific locus where a particular type of work emerges and develops, and seems very valid to me. But this author will dash off stuff to the effect of "the decidedly Germanic chord structure" when describing some piece of music, with no further context or elaboration, and I'll be like. Wait did Germany own those chords or something? Was Germany even a fucking country yet? Also: the artistic cultures of these European countries were all very much in conversation with each other at the time so, uh, what exactly makes this more German than just modern or European or whatnot? What is happening here lmao.
I mean, I'm not the target audience for the book so maybe I'm missing context, and maybe these throwaway references mean something more specific and technical than I realize, but it just feels like bumping my knee against a table leg every time I run into it haha.
(What does make sense in context, in a kind of depressing way, is how much the specter of nationalism hangs over this time period. It's not a theme the author is primarily interested in, but there'll be these throwaway references to stuff like, such-and-such music society was founded after the Franco-Prussian War to promote "French music", as distinct from the "Germanic tradition," and it'll include quotes from music reviewers using anything-other-than-French as a synonym for "excreable" and French as a synonym for "good and holy and just"... and when you know World War I is coming down the pipeline it's just like hnnnngh God all these nationalisms feel so contrived and fake and arbitrary and very rapidly hurtling toward disaster!!!)
Anyway. That's what I've been reading lately. God knows what I'll nerd-snipe myself with next.
Oh, also, one last funny bit about the translation: there's a bunch of words that are left with the French spelling, for no particular reason I can discern? The funniest of these is "rôle," which is always spelled the French way, even though there is no semantic difference to be had there. Whatcha trying to prove with that little hat over the O, lol. Though I guess The New Yorker still spells coordinate and cooperate as "coördinate" and "coöperate" so. I guess we all have our little spelling hangups :P
no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 06:24 pm (UTC)On the subject of national chord progressions, I remember being taught that chord iii was often used instead of the tonic in French music … ok I've just looked it up in my old music theory book and it says "we can hear it used as a substitute for I in late nineteenth-century French music, where its rather ambiguous nature is typical of the style". And the example they give is from Fauré's requiem! There is obviously no explanation of why French music in particular should favour ambiguity though, haha.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 11:51 pm (UTC)it... had not even occurred to me that that would be a difference but YEAH that sounds like a very different musical culture than the one i was exposed to haha. (the churches around me growing up were all either contemporary christian rock or "the congregation sings stuff straight out of this hymnal with no adornments and no separate choir" types, nothing in-between, at least in the ones i knew about.)
i also wouldn't be surprised if my exposure to certain categories of composer are just skewed due to happenstance—the composer that really got me hyped up about classical repertoire, way back in middle school, was when i heard Rachmaninoff for the first time, and i thereafter dutifully made my way through the Russian romantics on the basis of "More Like This, Please", and i really don't care much for the Debussy i've heard so i actively avoided stuff with him on the program, etc.
though i happened to go to a cool chamber music show THIS past weekend & a duo of pianists performed a few movements of Fauré's Dolly Suite and i LOVED it. so! nice to find new stuff; i'll have to do some more exploring & check otu the ones you mentioned!