BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) – THE LAST TWO DECADES

 We left Benjamin Britten having fallen out of bed with Gloriana in 1953. Even though he might have presented a poker face to the rest of the world, he was undoubtedly hurt. The following evening he was due to conduct in Aldeburgh. The Rev Walter Hussey had been invited during that day to lunch at Crag House but his host did not come down to join him and he was left on his own to eat lunch. When Ben did appear, he was in a highly nervous state and could not eat. Still, that could also have been performance nerves. As he grew older this problem got worse and he could never hold down food once he was in the dressing room. For the last ten years he had been producing works at a rate of knots with operas turned out almost by the year since Grimes. Now there was a marked slowdown. In the next three years he produced only three major works including the song cycle Winter Words based on poems by Hardy. However the one he already had had in mind was “The Turn of The Screw”.

 Since 1935 Ben had been friendly with, the artist, John Piper, who had designed the sets of his operas, and his wife, Myfanwy. It was she who introduced Ben to the novella by Henry James concerning a governess employed to look after two children, Miles and Clara. It was a story of corruption of innocence of the children by two previous servants, now ghosts. It is not clear if these ghosts are imaginary or real and in the Britten neither appears on the stage but we do hear them. It was a theme that would have immediately appealed to Ben and he asked Myfanwy to act as librettist. Ben had had a falling out with his earlier librettists for one reason or another or for no reason. He had previously exchanged ideas with Myfanwy on earlier works and she had got to know what he was looking for. This chamber opera had been commissioned by the Venice Biennale, and although postponed at Ben’s request, he eventually wrote it in an amazing period of four months. Of the music I will say nothing as Matthew has illustrated it already. Every year there will be some half a dozen productions in performance somewhere or another.

 There followed a four month world tour holiday for Ben and Peter) with some friends; well not exactly a holiday as their journey was peppered with recitals. For Ben the greatest delight of this trip would be his experiences with Indian, Balinese and Japanese music. Indian music had interested him after seeing a West End production in 1932. Japanese music would be new to him. It was however the Gamelan of Bali that had an overwhelming influence on much of his future output. Poulenc’s double piano concerto which he and Ben had played together in 1938 had its Gamelan influences. Later, when Ben was in America he met the Canadian composer Colin Macphee who was to become the leading authority in the West on Balinese music. Back in 1939 he and Ben played together on the piano of Elizabeth Mayer and I have been lucky enough to hear a recording. It sounds a bit like minimalist music, a sort of Steve Reich goes east. Now on this holiday Ben was able to hear it for himself. Their journey took them on to Japan where Ben was to see produced Noh plays, very stylised, which formed the inspiration for his later church parable, Curlew River.

 But it was Gamelan, which he listened to intensely, which came to influence his own writing. It was not just imitation exoticism, like Scheherazade, but the adoption of scales and sounds into his own music leaving its effect on much of the later Britten works. The first outcome was The Prince of the Pagodas, a full length ballet of the Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky variety, to be choreographed by John Cranko. For once Ben encountered difficulties and it remained unfinished by the time of his return. The production was not a happy one and Ben more or less withdrew from it, a pity because it contained more orchestral music than in anything he had previously written. His later television opera, Owen Wingrave, contained Gamelan touches as did Death in Venice, neither of which has the remotest connection with Java..

 Soon after this far eastern tour Ben was composing a new song cycle called Songs of the Chinese. This time the accompanist for whom he wrote was not himself but the guitarist Julian Bream.

In 1957 Ben conceived the idea of Noye’s Fludde, a community opera for children based on a fifteenth century Chester Miracle play. Originally it was planned as a television production but that was dropped and instead the first performance was in Orford Church, Suffolk, as part of the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival. It has been likened to a Baroque concerto grosso with a small professional concertino ensemble consisting of string quintet, recorder, piano, organ, and timpani. The rest is strictly amateur for strings, recorders, bugles, hand-bells, and percussion to be played by children performers, even beginners. Being in church, the audience is referred to as the “congregation”, and joins in the singing of three hymns; shades of J S Bach. Its joy is that it is a communal affair. Interestingly one of the first child cast members was a 12 year old Michael Crawford. Britten was insistent that performances should always take place in a church or a community hall but never in a theatre.

All of this took place against the background of Ben and Peter moving house again. Much as he loved Crag House and the view of the North Sea, their celebrity resulted in the whole world and its dog peering into their living room to see if they could see them. Fortunately they were able to find exactly what they wanted by doing a house swap with a local artist, Mary Potter, who needed something smaller. Thus it was that Ben and Peter moved into the Red House at the back of Aldeburgh, next to the golf course and away from prying eyes and, alas, the view of the North Sea. For the most part they found solitude and peace, except for the intermittent noise of the planes from the nearby American airbase, low level flying over town and sea. Later Ben and Peter bought a second smaller home some twenty miles inland, a retreat from Aldeburgh activity.

Another change was the expansion of the Jubilee Theatre which lacked until then dressing room space. Money was raised to purchase the adjoining butchers shop which resulted also in extending the size of the pit. It was there that they were able to perform for the first time A Midsummer Nights Dream. This was his next opera and something which Ben had always wanted to adapt. This time he did away with any librettist and he and Peter got down to cutting the play down to size whilst retaining most of Shakespeare’s wording. The magical nature of this work and its set was perhaps a Brittenesque foretaste of the psychedelic swinging sixties. The music has been amply demonstrated by Matthew. So you don’t need me.

The year 1960 brought about a happy or, rather, two happy conjunctions. The Leningrad Philharmonic under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky were giving performances at the Royal Festival Hall. I was there sitting, behind the double basses, for the Shostakovitch 8^th. He himself came on to the platform to take his applause, a painfully shy man. What I would not have known was that Ben had entered his box to meet him. Two shy men who would form a mutual admiration society. Also let loose on this tour was Mstislav Rostropovich (Slava) who was playing the first UK performance of the Shostakovitch first cello concerto. He was the antithesis of Shostakovitch, a man who did everything larger than life. When TV news broke with an attempted coup in Moscow, who else but Rostropovich would announce he was going to the bank and instead jump on a plane and be seen two hours later on TV standing alongside Boris Yeltsin. His wife went spare. I can well remember round about 1980 when visiting Aldeburgh a great kerfuffle erupted in Boots. Someone or another was looking for something he couldn’t find and suddenly there in front of me was Slava complaining fff with the whole staff following him up and down the aisles between the shelves. When Ben was introduced to him by Shostakovich, Slava immediately told Ben he would like him to compose something for him. They couldn’t exchange much conversation as Ben spoke no Russian and Slava only could manage two words of English, Thank you and Good bye. Still they established a lingua franca of German which Slava said no German could understand and which they called Aldeburgh Deutsch. After much difficulty with Ben going to the Soviet Union and Slava getting permission to come to England, Ben was able to play with him the cello sonata, the first of a number of works written for Slava and which, but for him, would never otherwise have seen the light of day.

 In 1961, the City of Coventry commissioned Benjamin Britten to write a work for the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral next to the bombed remains of St Michaels. It was the occasion for a big work. Ben had had thoughts previously of combining the Mass for the Dead with poetry cycles but nothing had come of it. Now was the opportunity to do just that. It needed a further element, a cry for peace and forgiveness, in that it was bombing which had destroyed the old cathedral. His vision was to intersperse sections of the Latin mass performed by the chorus and orchestra with a cycle of poems written by Wilfred Owen shortly before his death in 1918 to be sung by an English tenor (Pears) and a German baritone (Fischer-Dieskau) accompanied by a chamber group. The final climax would have all the forces joining together with Owen’s poem, Strange Meeting, being set against the In Paradisum. Then, having met Slava’s wife, the soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, Ben offered a part in it for her, in the Latin Mass. Thus it became a symbolism for peace between former warring enemies embracing the USSR. This was immediately opposed by the Soviet authorities who would not countenance Vishnevskaya appearing next to a German (it might have been different if he had been from East Germany) and their refusing her an exit permit. The was instead sung by Heather Harper who had 11 days to learn it and in four of which she already had singing engagements. Soon afterwards the famous Decca recording was made, this time with Vishnevskaya but for my money Heather Harper has always proved the better bet.   The first performance was an ecclesiastical shambles, like something out of Trollope. The main orchestra and chamber group were separated and needed separate conductors. The audience on the day was allowed in through a narrow door and were still entering when it was time to start. With the Queen and everybody else from Who’s Who there, except God, and the BBC keeping its eye on its schedules the dean and chapter wanted to get going but Ben would not do so. The War Requiem was a seminal work. It was played round the world. 200,000 copies of the recording were sold within a year.. It and its message were adopted by the Establishment and lefties alike. It was timely, having been written at the height of the cold war, with President Kennedy standing up to Kruschev, as well as it being in the middle of the Vietnam war.

 Ben was now approaching his fiftieth birthday and in some ways beginning to be seen as an Establishment figure. He had previously declined a knighthood but was one of the few people to have been awarded both the Order of Merit and Companion of Honour. He had no problems in accepting royal patronage if it meant writing music. He remained close to the Harewoods who in fact were musical as well as patrons of the Aldeburgh Festival. George was an opera buff and director at both Covent Garden and the ENO. On the less rarefied side of the coin he was also on the board of Leeds United FC and chairman of the Football Association for many years. Marion, his first wife, had been a concert pianist and was the daughter of the Viennese musicologist, Erwin Stein. And yet, though Ben may have been seen to have hob-nobbed with royalty, (or royalty hobnobbed with him), there is a telling exchange of letters between him and Peter in 1963. The Duke of Edinburgh had earlier asked Ben if he would write something for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Ben’s letter to Peter refers to “all these other dreary HRH’s – these hopeless misfits who go round condemning everything new in their snobbish way”. Peter, with his feet as ever more on the ground commented in reply that it was remarkable that royalty should befriend them at all as “we are after all queer, & left & conshies which is enough to put us outside the pale, apart from being artists as well”.

 In 1964, Ben was to receive the OM, a personal award of the Queen. By this time he was working with difficulty on the next opera, the first of his church parables, Curlew River. He did not want his librettist, William Plomer, to go and see a noh play for fear of what would turn out to be a pastiche. In Noh tradition, the women are played by men wearing masks. The role of the mad woman who has lost her son was to be played by Peter, and the thought of him playing a role in women’s clothes caused Ben considerable anxiety. The work is itself dreadfully difficult and involves players leading each other without any conductor. Often seasoned experts, like Ossian Ellis, the harpist, said that certain effects were impossible to achieve. Yet Ben himself was able to show them, on their own instruments, how it could be done. The man was truly amazing.

 Ben’s health was playing up a lot. During the writing of the Turn of the Screw he first suffered a complaint which affected his right arm making writing difficult. Other ailments affected him and in 1964 he was ordered to rest from performances and he and Peter travelled to India which he loved. Later they were invited by the Union of Soviet Composers to visit Armenia where they stayed with the Rostropovich’s. Whilst there, Ben set six poems by Pushkin to music in hastily contrived Russian for Vishnevskaya to sing with cello accompaniment for Rostropovich. Back in England he was to compose the first of three unaccompanied cello suites for him, inspired by Bach’s example.

 Ben was living now more than ever in Aldeburgh and with failing health the rest of the world came to see him. His public image was one of middle class sedateness, speaking somewhat like a school housemaster which did not betray that underneath was a man of acute sensitivity who could easily be hurt and who could break off from long held friendships. Rosamunde Strode who replaced Imogen Holst in looking after his paperwork made a point of keeping her distance and never interrupting him when he was at his desk. He was a disciplined man who rose early, believed in cold showers, worked uninterrupted till 1 pm; swam or played tennis or walked in the afternoon composing in his head and returned to his desk in the evening unless there were conflicting engagements. He encouraged young composers who sent him their work, like Robert Saxton and Peter Maxwell Davis, advising them not to compose at the piano but to listen for the sounds inside their heads. In 1964 he received the first Aspen award in Colorado out of more than a hundred nominations designed to recognize “the individual anywhere in the world judged to have made the greatest contribution to advancement of the humanities”. There, he delivered a speech setting out his credo on the role of the artist in society. For him music was a three way involvement, to be composed; to be performed and equally to be listened to. For him the audience was an essential participant. He was disparaging of the loudspeaker although, truth be told, it had earned him a bob or two. The prize brought with an award of $50.000 which Ben paid to a charity to help young musicians.

 Back home he was writing more for the Aldeburgh Festival which desperately needed a larger theatre for certain events. They scoured the county when chance fell their way in Snape, near his first house, the old Mill.   The old Maltings, a massive building, once used for making barley, had fallen into disuse and were up for sale. The money needed to convert was £175,000 and was quickly raised. The hall seating 800 was reckoned to be the finest in the country and soon was used not only for the Festival but for other events and recordings. The Maltings was opened by the Queen in 1967 with a concert overture by you know who, “The Building of the House”. I have a recording of it with the chorus entering out of tune, a whole tone higher than the orchestra. Ben would of course have been appalled, but neither he nor the honoured visitor could have possibly commented.

 Early in 1968 Ben took his second holiday in Venice where he composed the third parable, The Prodigal Son, but whilst there he became seriously ill with bacterial endocarditis which affected the inner tissues of his heart, the same disease which ended Mahler’s life. It didn’t stop Ben from completing The Prodigal Son to be performed at the Maltings. It was only modern antibiotics which saved his life, but it would lead to the serious heart condition which was to follow.

 Two years after the opening of the Maltings, disaster struck, in the form of a faulty electrical connection, causing a fire which burnt the new building down. Ben and Peter look shattered, were shattered, but vowed to keep the festival going. The two of them undertook a strenuous US tour to raise money for the eventual re-opening. Later that year they were performing in Australia and New Zealand. This was to be followed by a further opera, composed by Ben to be performed in a new medium. Owen Wingrave was yet another Henry James story which appealed to Ben. This time, it was an opera written for television, about a son in a traditional military family but who is a conscientious objector. Ben did not get on with television and their TV ways and made it clear he had no intention to revisit the opera or the TV studio. Had he lived, which alas he did not, he might well have thought of adapting it to the stage. We shall never know.

 Now in 1970, his mind was turning to another opera, this time based on Thomas Mann’s novella, written following the death of Mahler in 1911, Death in Venice. The story of a dying writer who, in Venice, falls in love with what he sees to be the perfection of a boy whom he has watched but who does not appear to be aware of him. It is yet another Britten theme where he seems to be confronting the world either with his devils or is it a challenge of “so what?”. Is it provocation or is it the release of what he feels? The odd thing throughout is that Benjamin Britten was such a seemingly conventional person who was angered by others who broke the conventions. Although a private misfit himself, he deliberately went out of his way not to draw attention to himself. He seems to have seen the misbehaviour of others as doing harm to him. Thus it was that he was deeply hurt by the behaviour of Lord Harewood in leaving his wife Marion for another woman. Ben had introduced him to Marion in the first place, and now gently suggested ”with regret” that Harewood step down from being chairman of the Aldeburgh Festival; then afterwards let it be known he did not seek his company any more. Ben, with his middle class background, was not concerned for Noblesse Oblige as Les Bourgeois Obligent.

 By 1970 Ben’s health was such that he had difficulty in walking. He was diagnosed as having a defective heart valve and needed an operation. Ben put this off in order to finish Death in Venice. When eventually he underwent surgery two years later it was found his heart was too enlarged to carry out the planned process. During the six hour operation he had a minor stroke. There was nothing the medical world could do. Despite his weakened physical state he continued writing. He turned back to some earlier works from his younger days to give them a new lick of paint. He cried on hearing Paul Bunyan for the first time in thirty five years and might well have decided to revisit it. He wept when he heard in 1973 of the death of Wystan Auden after twenty years of virtual estrangement.

 Confined now to a wheelchair and unable to write, he took on a young composer as an amanuensis, David Matthews who will be speaking to us. Despite his physical weakness he wrote his third quartet requested by and promised to Hans Keller. Matthew has illustrated it to us. The invention and mind of Benjamin Britten are as active as ever. It is like no other string quartet one knows. Its mixtures of duos and solos and a third movement which sounds as though inspired by the sounds of an aviary belong to another planet. The final pasacaglia is simply haunting, a valediction from a man artistically desperate to hang on in, but who knew he was approaching his end. Only with few weeks left he was created a life peer, Lord Britten of Aldeburgh. He justified this jokingly that as he could not use his right arm, he need only now sign his name, “Britten”. He died in the arms of Peter Pears on 6^th December 1976. He was buried in Aldeburgh church yard where the choir sung the Hymn to the Virgin, which he had written at school when he was sixteen.

 This centenary retrospective may not have convinced all of you. No need to worry on that score. Not everyone takes to Bach or is into Wagner or digs Chopin. Let’s face it, Handel is not Matthew’s cup of tea. One might say of Benjamin Britten that he was a marmite composer. What one hopes has come through is the sense of true greatness. This series has shown Benjamin Britten in a different light, that he was not just a youthful show off, as Mozart had been, or as Beethoven was. Love him or not, he was someone who was an intensely individual creative genius as we are never likely to encounter again. Certainly not this side of a convergence of the Great Bear and Pleiades taking place on a St Cecilia’s day.

CLAUDE ACHILLE DEBUSSY 1862 – 1918

This is the last composer in the series selected by Matthew in our Belle Époque series and where Matthew is dealing with his early years. In his life he was seen as one of the set of composers from the group we have examined and it is only later on that he emerges as the great figure of French music who stands out from all the rest. His name is associated with impressionism but it was not he who gave it the name. His music is distinctive in its sounds, its atmosphere, its harmonies and yes its impressions. His methods cannot be compared to the impressionist painters but he evokes the same mood. You only have to set Monet’s realisations of Rouen Cathedral against Debussy’s La Cathédral Engloutie. With his harmonies he developed tone colours. With his light “brush strokes” of sound as in Jeu de Vagues, the second movement of La Mer, he produced spots and splashes of sound which bring to mind Seurat and the pointillist movement.

 Born in 1862 he was named Achille-Claude but he preferred it the other way round and switched it later on. Usually one had a relative’s name bestowed but in this case Debussy was given his father’s first name of Achille which he obviously did not like as he himself was called Claude. There is no record of his mother having dipped him in the Styx or in the Seine for that matter. He was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the north western areas above Paris, the eldest of five children. His father owned a china and hardware shop and his mother was a seamstress. Where have all the seamstresses now gone? The family moved to Paris in 1867, but as with most of the other composers in this series, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 had its effect and Debussy’s mother, pregnant again, moved for safety to an aunt in Cannes. It was there that Debussy at the age of seven began piano lessons which were paid for by his great aunt. Round about 1871 he came to the attention of Marie Fleurville, a pupil of Chopin, or so she claimed. It is incredible that, having started at the age of seven or eight Debussy by the age of ten had gained a place at the Paris Conservatoire. There he spent eleven years, shades of Prokofiev at St Petersburg.

Reports state that, though clearly talented, Debussy was argumentative and experimental, challenging the rigid teaching of the conservatoire, seeking out dissonances and intervals that were frowned upon, just as one saw with Prokofiev. It obviously goes with the age. And like Prokofiev he was a brilliant pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have pursued a professional career as such had he so wished.

 During the summers of 1880, 1881, and 1882 Debussy accompanied the wealthy Russian patroness Nadezhda von Meck, as tutor and piano tutor for her children as she travelled with her family in Europe and Russia. One will recall that she was the patron of Tchaikovsky for eleven years on condition that they never met. Madame von Meck did send a work of Debussy to Tchaikovsky for approval but he dismissed it pretty well out of hand. It was never published anyway. A greater influence was Debussy’s close friendship with Madame Vasnier, a singer he met when he began working as an accompanist to earn some money. She and her husband respectively gave Debussy emotional and professional support. The exact form that this took can only be left to the imagination. Monsieur Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine, the son-in-law of his former piano teacher, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville. So she did have some connections after all, apart from possibly playing Chopsticks with Chopin.

 The winning of the Prix de Rome has featured extensively in this series that by now we might all feel we want a go. Debussy took first prize in 1884 with his composition L’enfant prodigue, This condemned him to a minimum three year residence without remission at the French Academy in Rome, (the Villa Medici). According to the letters he wrote to Madame Vasnier he found the artistic atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the monastic quarters abominable. Otherwise it was alright except that neither did he delight in the pleasures of the “Eternal City”, finding the Italian opera of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. Well, you can’t please everybody. Debussy was not the first to experience the boredom of Italy. Berlioz, as related in his Memoires, went through just the same kind of experience. All that was necessary during this sojourn was to produce one work to send back a year, called envois. Debussy managed four of them, first a symphonic ode Zuleima which seems to have disappeared; then the orchestral piece, Printemps, except that it was not an orchestral piece as we now know it until 1913 after the original had been destroyed at some time by fire and only later reconstructed and orchestrated by Henri Busser. It was originally written for voices with an accompaniment of two pianos. It was inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera from which one can conclude that Debussy had his good moments in Italy. The committee back at the Conservatoire pronounced it as containing vague impressionism of the most dangerous kind. The third of these was La Demoiselle Élue a cantata based on the best known poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Debussy had taken a shine to the English Pre-Raphaelites but that has not prevented one entry in Google referring to him as an Italian poet. The cantata was criticized by the committee as “bizarre”. The fourth piece, Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, owes much to César Franck and Fauré. It is in three movements and is the nearest thing to a piano concerto that Debussy created although the piano is not so much a star as a fellow worker. The last of its movements owes a little something to D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Theme. The committee chided him for “courting the unusual” and hoped for something better. Massenet concluded, “He is an enigma”.

We have seen from an examination of the other composers in this series how they all fell under the spell of Wagner in some way. Fauré differed from the others in that, notwithstanding the magnet of Wagner, his musical output showed no sign of influence. Wagnerism can be detected in the others to a lesser or greater extent.

 In 1888, after his return from Rome, Debussy made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to become exposed to and seduced by Wagner’s operas. They had a lasting impact on his work and he responded positively to Wagner’s sensuousness and striking harmonies which is evident in La Demoiselle Élue. Wagner’s extrovert emotionalism was not to be Debussy’s way but Wagner’s methods were employed even though the outcomes were different, as was certainly the sound produced.

 In 1889, the year of the centenary of the French Revolution, Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle. It was there that Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music and from then on made use of the pentatonic scale and the whole tone scale giving his music a trade mark from this time onwards.

 These extremes between Wagner and Debussy are best described in what has been my bible for the last 60 years, Music Ho by Constant Lambert, first published in 1934. I quote:

 “The emotional reaction we get from Wagner may be compared to the direct and almost cinematic emotional appeal of a ship with the hero’s sweetheart on board leaving the quay, or the departure of a troop train in time of war. The emotional reaction we get from Debussy is of the less personal and more subtle order that we get from the mere sight of an unknown ship in sail.

 The complete contrast of both method and aim between Debussy’s work and that of the German Romantics may be seen again if we compare the maddening repetitions in Wagner’s operas with the equally maddening repetitions in Pelléas and Mélisande. The Wagnerian repetitions are a mounting and rhetorical series reminiscent of a lawyer’s speech – an oratorical device whose aim is to emphasize the meaning of the argument until not even the dullest member of the jury remains unconvinced. Debussy’s static repetitions do not quicken the pulse – they slacken it. Like the repetitions of an oriental priest their aim is to destroy the superficial connotations of the phrase until it appeals to the deeper instincts rather than to reason”.

 1889 is a suitable place to pick up on Debussy’s private life. This ranks more alongside Fauré than it does alongside Franck. Debussy’s private life was extremely

accident in 1899. He ultimately left Gaby for her friend Rosalie Texier (‘Lilly’), a fashion model whom he married in 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him. Oh là là. Chausson would have been turning in his grave. More was to come on the basis of what is good for the gander is good for the goose. But that will be later on. Curtail your excitement please.

 The naughty nineties would see the emergence of Debussy as his own man, the blossoming of his own style. In an article such as this, one cannot go through his complete oeuvres but simply mention some of the better known. The first major creation was the prelude, L’Après Midi D’Un Faune, an atmospheric image based on a poem by the symbolist poet, Stéphan Mallarmé. It is a comparatively short work, about eight minutes, a languorous description of the faun stretched out on a rock in the afternoon sun. Some critics were unkind (“sounds of a rotten flute”). To-day, it does not matter how many times it gets played on Classic FM it remains as beautiful as ever.

 If we move on to the end of the nineties, the work of note is the Three Nocturnes, Not nocturnes like Chopin or a notturno like Mozart but a nocturne inspired by the impressionist paintings of that name by Whistler. The most authoritative comment I can supply is from Debussy himself who wrote:

 “The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. ‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. ‘Fêtes’ gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. ‘Sirènes’ depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.”

 Somehow I cannot see how either Nuages or Fêtes could ever be perceived as nocturnal. They are vibrantly filled with light.

 The next big composition was Pelléas and Mélisande, Debussy’s only completed opera from 1902. It was based on a symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck who provided the libretto. At went well until trouble broke out between Debussy and Maeterlinck. Debussy had promised the role of Mélisande to Georgette Leblanc, a singer and actress who shared a relationship with Maeterlinck from 1895 to 1918. However, on hearing the voice of the new Scottish singer, Mary Garden, Debussy became insistent that she should take the role. When Maeterlinck heard of this, he was furious and tried to take legal action to prevent the opera from going ahead. When this failed, he threatened Debussy with physical violence. Debussy’s wife, Lily, sought to dissuade the playwright from attacking her husband with a cane. On 14 April, Le Figaro published a letter from Maeterlinck in which he completely dissociated himself from the production, complaining about the cuts that had been made in the libretto although he himself had originally sanctioned them. Maeterlinck finally saw the opera in 1920, two years after Debussy’s death. He was to confess: “In this affair I was entirely wrong and he was a thousand times right.”

 Pelléas contains a composite of all the idioms and clichés which Debussy had gathered. It is a magical work, sung in a French recitative, with just one shadowy momentary chorus of sailors who disappear into the mist. It needs what it never gets, a decent production. It is a kind of Arthurian legend set in a forest and a castle and would be enhanced by an Art Nouveau decor it never gets. Wonderful musical and theatrical experiences have been ruined by clever-clever productions which show bare stages, forests made of steel constructions and projections and pre-mediaeval characters dressed in vests and jeans.

 Shortly after this time, Debussy’s domestic life was to change again. Although Lily was affectionate, loyal and liked by Debussy’s friends, he became increasingly irritated by what he felt were her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity. In 1904, he was to meet Emma Bardac, the estranged wife of a Parisian banker. Now there is a name we have come across before. Emma had had eight years, on the side with Fauré. The way some, not all, French composers switched attachments can be compared to the way English football managers, not all, switch clubs. On this basis, Debussy was in a league of his own, only on a level with ‘arry Redknapp. Anyway, as far as Emma Bardac was concerned, Debussy decided to have a trial run. Having dispatched Lily to her father’s home Debussy secretly took Emma off to Jersey for a holiday. On their return, Debussy wrote to Lily from Dieppe telling her their marriage was over although he made no mention of Emma. The consequences were sad. You will recall Debussy’s threat of suicide if she had not married him. Now it was her turn. She actually attempted suicide in the Place de la Concorde. She would have done better to have got herself run over. Instead, she shot herself in the chest with a revolver. She did however survive but with the bullet remaining lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused a degree of ostracism for Debussy whilst Emma was disowned by her family.

In the spring of 1905, finding the hostility towards them intolerable, Debussy and Emma, now pregnant, crossed again to Jersey. Emma’s divorce was finalized in May and the couple settled at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne from the end of July to the end of August 1905. Here, Debussy was to correct proofs to his symphonic suite, La mer, as well as to celebrate his own divorce from Lily on 2 August. The couple’s daughter (the composer’s only child) Claude-Emma, affectionately known as “Chouchou”, was born on 30 October 1905. Her parents were eventually to marry in 1908.

 The above events took place against the composition of La Mer, for me the greatest of Debussy’s works. It is called a symphonic seascape and is a three movement triptych. It is almost as if parts of the Nocturnes and Pelléas had been preparations for the sound world of the new work. It is the apex of Debussy’s impressionism where colour and atmosphere have taken over from formal principles of exposition and development. Pictorially it is Turner, not Monet. What Debussy gives us is pure cold salt water or as Constant Lambert again wrote:

 “Whereas in most works of art inspired by the sea, Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony for example, we are given the sea as a highly picturesque background to human endeavour and human emotion, a suitable setting for introspective skippers, heroic herring fishers and intrepid explorers, La Mer is actually a picture of the sea itself, a landscape without figures, or rather a seascape without ships”.

 There are some works which never fail to thrill, however many times one hears them. They vary of course from person to person. For me in these is a frisson I get every time I hear La Mer in the concert hall. It is an experience never fully captured on disc. The first movement entitled “At sea from dawn to midday”. After hearing it in rehearsal Erik Satie said to the composer, “I liked it all but particularly the little bit at a quarter to eleven”. It grows to a wonderful climax. A kind of chorale sounds in the depths as the sun reaches its zenith, and one last wave breaks into foam. The second movement, Play of the Waves serves as a splashing and dancing scherzo.

The final movement is the dialogue between wind and sea which becomes an all-embracing force sometimes terrifying with alternating crashing waves and calms leading to one of the greatest orchestral swells which will continue in the mind long after the music has ceased .

 La Mer is a combination of the pictorial and the symphonic. Debussy was not to repeat it but he later produced his preludes, two books, each containing twelve miniatures for piano. Pictorial and picture postcard in size. But don’t be mistaken by this. Each states a lot more than “Wish you were here”. Picture Album might have been a better name as they are not a prelude to anything. Apart from Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp minor, no-one remembers preludes by number or key and Debussy sensibly overcame this problem by giving them all alluring titles. Mind you, he curiously wrote these at the foot of each. Was he trying to tell us that the music is more important than the impression it describes or was it abstract music he had written with a penned after-thought, as if to say “this is what it might remind you of”? Possibly so with the Dancers of Delphi or Footsteps in the Snow but surely not with the Submerged Cathedral or General Lavine – Eccentric?

 Debussy’s life descended into difficulties. One little known curio he wrote in 1910 was La Plus Que Lente (The Less Than Slow). It is written for orchestra with solo cimbalom, an instrument I have only heard before in Kodaly’s Hary Janos. It is a salon piece, a waltz, which somehow seems to look back like some tearful fond farewell to the Belle Epoque. In 1909 Debussy developed bowel cancer. The first world war would depress him and he began to suffer from a loss of inspiration but there is no hint of this in his music. Later Debussy was to include a set of orchestral Images, atmospheric impressions of England, Spain and France with England represented by the Keel Row. There was the ballet, Jeux, commissioned by Diaghileff and first performed just before the Rite of Spring. It is a curious affair of a tennis match but not of the Roland Garros – Grand Slam variety. It owes more to Zola than to Federer and I can’t imagine it being listened to by Andy Murray or his mum.

Debussy’s joy in life was Chou-Chou for whom he wrote the Children’s Corner Suite (orchestrated by André Caplet) including Jimbo’s Lullaby and the Golliwog’s Cakewalk. This latter has thankfully so far escaped the attentions of the officials of Rotherham who might ordain that it receive the same treatment as Robertson’s Marmalade.

 Towards the end he turned his attention to the abstract and his inspiration was renewed with a planned series of six sonatas but of which he only completed three, for cello, for violin and for violin, flute and harp. He died of cancer in March 1918. At the time Paris was under bombardment from the German spring offensive of that year. Debussy was buried at the cemetery at Passy. Sorrowfully, his daughter, Chou-Chou, was placed next to him after she succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1919.

 In the end, it was Debussy who turned out to be the great individual champion for French music. He was only 56 when he died. Who knows what directions his music would have taken had he lived on till, say, the outbreak of the second world war. We will never know. We can only be thankful for what he did leave us.

GABRIEL URBAIN FAURE (1845 – 1924)
It can be a little difficult at times to penetrate into Fauré’s music and the life of this composer. For many he remains something of a mystery and somewhat difficult to pin down. He remains something of an enigma both about the nature of his musical output and about the man himself. What is also problematic is placing him in time.
His music to begin with does not exactly make you jump out of your chair. The 19th century is overloaded with heroics, fate knocking at the door, elation, emotion, hysteria and dramatics. Its dependence is on form, question and answer, exposition and recapitulation. With Fauré there is none of this. The one quality which constantly comes through is restraint. His works rarely contain carefully sculptured and repeated themes as of a Beethoven or of a Cesar Franck. Often Fauré’s compositions, his piano quintets for example, appear simply to unfold from point to point as if improvised. It is almost a style of creative anonymity which in turn reflects on our perception of him as a person, who he was and also when he was. It is a fairly safe bet that most people know Fauré from only a very few of his works. The best known and most loved is his Requiem with its tranquil and devotional character, and of course the ever popular Pavanne, with or without choral supplement, and whose popularity reached a far wider audience than Fauré could ever have envisaged with the 1998 World Cup hosted in France even though it never had a chance in hell of outdoing the Italians with the Three Tenors. Still, despite Nessun Dorma, Italy went to sleep in its attempt to win the World Cup and it was France who won at the Stade Français, thanks to Zinedine Zidane …and Gabriel Fauré
Incidentally I am prepared to hazard a bet that when it comes to the next World Cup in Brazil, we are going to hear Bachianas Brasilieras No 5 by Villa Lobos. If you don’t know it, sample it now, preferably the recording sung by Victoria de Los Angeles, before they ruin it for you.
Now I stated above “who he was and also when he was”. Most people if asked and, familiar with the Requiem and the Pavanne, would rightly say late 19th century. The perception is that Fauré would have come and gone by the turn of the century to be followed by Debussy and the impressionists and the twentieth century modernists. It therefore comes as a shock to find that Fauré’s long active musical life extends to 1924. He not only outlived the Belle Epoque, was principal of the Conservatoire when Debussy was at his height, but outlived Debussy and still continued to compose. He travelled across time, a suitable companion Dr. Who may be with his droopy moustache. One can easily be misled in that he was born in 1845 and thus a contemporary of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. A more appropriate comparison might be made with the English composer Charles Villiers Stanford, born 1852 and who died the same year as Fauré. Stanford is little known today but he was a stalwart of Victorian England, writing hymns, anthems and much religious music as well as seven symphonies. He became unfairly in my view consigned to the world of the forgotten. Fauré on the other hand continued to write, notwithstanding deafness, aware of emerging new trends and even flirting with atonality. His cause was taken up by Aaron Copland, who as a young man in the early twenties took lessons in France.
Fauré was born in Midi-Pyrénées, in the south of France, the youngest of six children and the only one of them to display musical talent. His father became a schoolmaster. He recalled in his last years, “I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. … But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in the little chapel of my school”.
Helped by a scholarship from the local diocese, Faurés father arranged to send him for his education to a new school run by one Niedermeyer in Paris. There, from age 9 till he was 20 Fauré was educated at a boarding schoold in a gloomy austere régime. Niedermeyer, whose goal was to produce qualified organists and choirmasters, focused on church music. When Niedermeyer died, Camille Saint-Saëns took charge of piano studies and introduced contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Fauré recalled in old age, “At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment … the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I had for Saint-Saëns, throughout my life.”
Saint Saens who was ten years older became his mentor and the close friendship between them lasted until Saint-Saëns died sixty years later. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including the Cantique de Jean Racine, the earliest of his choral works to enter the regular repertory. He left the school in July 1865, as a laureate in organ, piano, harmony and composition, a Maître de Chapelle .
Fauré’s first appointment from 1866 was as an organist at Rennes in Brittany. During his four years there he supplemented his income by taking private pupils. He continued to compose, but none of his works from this period survive. He was generally bored at Rennes and had an uneasy time with the parish priest who in early 1870, decided to give Fauré the push after he turned up to play at Mass one Sunday still in his evening clothes after a night out at a ball. Almost immediately and with the help of a quiet word from Saint-Saëns, he secured the post of assistant organist at a church in the north of Paris but he was to remain there for only a few months. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he volunteered for military service. He took part in the action to raise the Siege of Paris, and saw action in other theatres. He got awarded a Croix de Guerre.
With the defeat by Prussia there followed the Paris Commune with its brief but bloody conflict from March to May 1871. Fauré got out and took up a teaching post at the École Niedermeyer, which, to avoid the violence in Paris, had temporarily relocated to Switzerland. His first pupil at the school was the composer, André Messager, who became a lifelong friend. (Messager could do with a separate note. He was a distinguished organist and conductor. He was known for opera, operetta and light music. He conducted the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas and Melisande, he conducted Wagner at the Opéra whilst becoming also chief conductor at the Folies Bergères. Messager came to London and was the only French composer to be commissioned by D’Oyly Carte for one of the Savoy operas).

When Fauré returned to Paris in October 1871 he was appointed choirmaster at Saint Sulpice under the composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor. During some services Widor and Fauré improvised simultaneously at the church’s two organs, trying to catch each other out. Fauré regularly attended Saint-Saëns’s musical salons. He was also a founding member of the Société Nationale de Musique, formed in February 1871 to promote new French music. Other members included Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Chabrier, d’Indy, Franck, Lalo and Massenet. Fauré became secretary of the society in 1874 and a number of his works were first presented at the society’s concerts.
In 1874 Fauré moved from Saint-Sulpice to the Église de la Madeleine, in order to deputise as principal organist for Saint-Saëns during the latter’s many absences on tour. He was gradually moving up the ladder of distinguished churches with their organs albeit on the coat tails of his more famous mentor. Fauré had made it to the top as an organist but although he played the organ professionally for four decades, he left no solo compositions for the instrument. He preferred the piano to the organ, which he played only because it gave him a regular income.
1877 was a notable year for Fauré, both professionally and personally. In January his first violin sonata, an impassioned work compared with later, was performed at a Société Nationale concert with great success and marked a turning-point in his composing career. In March, Saint-Saëns retired as official organist from the Madeleine and was succeeded as organist by his choirmaster, Dubois. So Fauré was appointed choirmaster to take over from Dubois.
On the domestic front Fauré became engaged in July to Marianne Viardot. She was the daughter of Pauline Viardot Garcia, a founder member also of the Société Nationale de Musique, a famous mezzo of the day and a rare woman composer of the period. We are told that Fauré was deeply in love with Marianne but for whatever reason and to his great distress which he no doubt got over, she broke off the engagement in November 1877. Well these things do happen. Saint-Saëns again came to the rescue and, to distract Fauré, took him off to Weimar where he was introduced to Franz Liszt. This visit gave Fauré a taste for foreign travel, which he pursued for the rest of his life. The next year, he and Messager made trips abroad to see Wagner operas at Cologne , a complete Ring cycle in Munich and again at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and Die Meistersinger in Munich and at Bayreuth, where they also saw Parsifal. Fauré admired Wagner, as did many of his French contemporaries, and had a detailed knowledge of his music. Nevertheless whilst he enjoyed listening to his Wagner he remained one of the few composers of his generation who did not come under Wagner’s musical influence. Fauré and Messager frequently were to perform as a party piece a joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth. This short, up-tempo piano work for four hands sends up themes from The Ring.
In 1883 Fauré married Marie Fremiet, the daughter of a prominent sculptor. The marriage was affectionate, but Marie did not share his passionate nature, according to his biographer, Duchot who presumably gathered his evidence under the bed. Marie became resentful of Fauré’s frequent absences, his dislike of domestic life – “horreur du domicile” – and his love affairs, while she remained at home. How not understanding is that! Fauré valued Marie as a friend and confidante, writing to her often when away from home. According to Duchot, Fauré was extremely attractive to women and “his conquests were legion in the Paris salons.” The bourgeois looking man with the droopy moustache now begins to resemble something out of Collette. A romantic attachment to the singer Emma Bardac from around 1892 was followed by another to the composer Adela Maddison. In 1900 Fauré met the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans. This led to a relationship which lasted for the rest of Fauré’s life. He maintained her in a Paris flat, and she acted openly as his companion. A good French tradition maintained still by the present President of the Fifth Republic.
Now with a family to support, Fauré spent most of his time in running the daily services at the Madeleine and giving piano and harmony lessons. His compositions however earned him very little. Having sold them outright to his publisher at an average of 60 francs a song, Fauré received no royalties. During this period, he wrote several large-scale works, in addition to many piano pieces and songs, but he destroyed most of them after a few performances. One work to survive from this period fortunately is the Requiem. It was begun in 1887 and revised and expanded until its final version dating from 1901. After its first performance, in 1888, the priest in charge told Fauré, “We don’t need these novelties. the Madeleine’s repertoire is quite rich enough”.
During his thirties he began to suffer with bouts of depression not helped by his broken engagement and his lack of success as a composer. In 1890 he received a prestigious and remunerative commission to write an opera but Verlaine, his librettist, failed to deliver which plunged Fauré into so deep a depression that his friends became seriously concerned about his health It took a trip to Venice and writing some songs for him to recover his spirits and it was at this time that his liaison with Emma Bardac began. His principal biographers all agree that this affair inspired a burst of creativity and a new originality in his music. Bardac had a daughter, Hélène, known as “Dolly” and there is some suspicion that Fauré was her father although it is said to be unlikely. Come what may, Dolly was the inspiration for a suite for two pianos, a delightful work which is not susceptible to DNA testing. It is better known in its orchestral version of 1906
During the 1890s Fauré’s fortunes improved. His career is like something out of Shepherd Meade’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”. You follow someone; you give them your support and you help them to get promotion and then you step into the hole which they have left behind. In 1892, the position of professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire became available. Saint-Saëns as usual encouraged Fauré to apply for the vacant post. The Conservatoire regarded Fauré as “dangerously modern”, and its head, Ambroise Thomas, blocked the appointment. Instead, Fauré was appointed as inspector of the music conservatories in the French provinces. He disliked the prolonged travelling around the country but it was enough to put him on the first rung of the academic ladder and gave him a regular income which enabled him to give up teaching amateur pupils. Four years on, Ambroise Thomas died, and Dubois – remember him, the organist at La Madeleine – took over as head of the Conservatoire. So Fauré took a step up and succeeded Dubois as chief organist of La Madeleine. Dubois’ move created another hole to fill. Jules Massenet, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, had himself more than fully expected to succeed Thomas and might well have got the job. But he got greedy by insisting on being appointed for life and was promptly turned down. He was probably a football manager at some time. Thus it was that Dubois was appointed instead of Massenet who resigned his professorship in fury and thus it was that Dubois got Fauré appointed professor of composition in his place. Another shunt up the ladder.
Amongst the up and coming composers that came under Fauré were Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Charles Koechlin, Louis Aubert, George Enescu, Alfredo Casella and Nadia Boulanger. Fauré’s ensured his students obtained a firm grounding in the basic skills, a task which he delegated to his assistant. His role was to develop each student’s individual talents, not to hand out recipes for composing according to his style. Each of them were to find their own paths in differing and often opposed directions.
Fauré’s works of the last years of the century include incidental music for Maeterlink’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Prométhée, a tragedy composed for outdoor performance. The work is unusual for Fauré being originally scored for huge instrumental and vocal forces. From 1903 to 1921, Fauré undertook musical criticism for Le Figaro but he was too nice and only liked to emphasise the positive aspects of a work.

Fauré’s further climb to the top of the conservatoire hierarchy eventually came about in 1905 some 13 years after he had started out as a teaching member of staff. The occasion centred around Fauré’s pupil, Maurice Ravel, who was already by then established as a composer. Most composers of note had managed to win the country’s top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, if not always at the first attempt. Berlioz who had had four goes described in his Memoires the difficulties and opposition he had met from the Establishment. Ravel is the most distinguished of French composers not to have won the Prix de Rome at all. It was in 1905 that a scandal of near Dreyfus proportions erupted in French musical circles after Ravel, at his sixth attempt, the top favourite, was eliminated in an early round. Reactionary elements within the Faculty had played their part. Dubois, him again, head of the Conservatoire, became the target of the protest and, whether because he had been actively involved or simply because it happened on his watch, he announced his retirement and stepped down. And who was there to fill the gap in his place? Yes, you’ve got it in one. None other than Gabriel Fauré with Government support to boot. This mild looking man radically changed the administration and curriculum. He appointed independent external judges to decide on admissions, examinations and competitions, a move which enraged faculty members who had not only formed the jury but had given preferential treatment to their own private pupils. Deprived of what had been a good earner, many of them resigned. Fauré became dubbed “Robespierre” by the old guard as he modernised and broadened the range of the musical curriculum which now included not only some Wagner – previously an unmentionable name within the Conservatoire – but was extended so as to range from Renaissance polyphony to the works of Debussy.
Previously, when he was struggling to earn a living as an organist and piano teacher Fauré did not have as much time for composition as he would have liked. Now, with his new position, he was decidedly better off financially and he became much more widely known as a composer. Still, running the Conservatoire left him with no more time for composition than before. If he had only one thing in common with Mahler it was to spend the summer months, usually by a lake, in composition. His works from this period include his opera, Pénélope, a number of songs and for the piano some of his Nocturnes and Barcarolles written between 1906 and 1914. I was first introduced by Matthew Taylor to Fauré’s piano works during his Chopin series and I was struck by their musicality, more than I had been of his more celebrated predecessors, Chopin or Liszt. That’s purely personal.
In 1909 Fauré was elected to the Institut de France, a body grouping together five académies including the Académie française. It helped to have two long-established members canvassing on his behalf. One as ever was Saint-Saëns and the other Fauré’s father in law, the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, whose equestrian statues including Napoleon on horseback and Joan of Arc on horseback, bedeck Paris. During this period, Fauré began to develop serious problems with his hearing. Not only did he start to go deaf, but sounds became distorted, so that high and low notes sounded painfully out of tune to him.
He began to visit England frequently where he was invited in 1908 to play at Buckingham Palace, the year of the first London performance of Elgar’s First Symphony at which he was present as well as dining with the composer afterwards. Elgar described him as a real gentleman – the highest kind of Frenchman whom he admired greatly. Elgar tried hard to get Fauré’s Requiem performed at the Three Choirs Festival, but it did not actually get its first English performance until 1937, nearly fifty years after its first performance in France.
Faure was in Germany at the outbreak of the First World War but managed to get back to Paris. He remained in France for the duration of the war. He was against a boycott of German music led by Saint-Saëns but their disagreement did not affect their friendship.

In 1920, at the age of 75, Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. In 1922 a presidential public tribute was accorded to him, a national homage, at the Sorbonne. Despite not being able to hear a single note it was nevertheless a great joy for this illustrious composer surrounded by other illustrious artists to receive such acclaim.

In his last months Fauré struggled to complete a string quartet. Twenty years earlier he had been the dedicatee of Ravel’s String Quartet. Ravel and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own. He refused for many years, on the grounds that it was too difficult. When he finally decided to write it, he did so, telling his wife, “I’ve started a Quartet for strings, without piano. This is a genre which Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes all those who are not Beethoven to be terrified of it.”

Aaron Copland wrote that although Fauré’s works can be divided into the usual “early”, “middle” and “late” periods, there is no such radical difference between his first and last periods as is evident with many other composers. Copland found premonitions of late Fauré in even the earliest works, and traces of the early Fauré in the works of his old age.

Fauré suffered from poor health in his later years, brought on in part by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les Six, most of whom were devoted to him. Fauré died in Paris from pneumonia on 4 November 1924 at the age of 79. He was given a state funeral at the Église de la Madeleine.