Pavane (Fauré)
[1] Fauré's original version of the piece was written for piano and chorus in the late 1880s.
[4] He envisaged a purely orchestral composition, using modest forces, to be played at a series of light summer concerts conducted by Jules Danbé.
[4] After Fauré opted to dedicate the work to his patron, Elisabeth, comtesse Greffulhe,[5] he felt compelled to stage a grander affair and at her recommendation he added an invisible chorus to accompany the orchestra (with additional allowance for dancers).
The words were inconsequential verses, à la Verlaine, on the romantic helplessness of man, written by the Countess's cousin, Robert de Montesquiou.
[4] Three days later, the choral version was premiered at a concert of the Société nationale de musique.
In 1891, the Countess finally helped Fauré produce the version with both dancers and chorus, in a "choreographic spectacle" designed to grace one of her garden parties in the Bois de Boulogne.
[9] With choreography by Léonide Massine a ballet version entered the repertoire of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1917, alternatively billed as Las Meninas or Les Jardins d'Aranjuez, danced to music by not only Fauré but also Maurice Ravel and others.
[10] For Massine, Fauré's music had "haunting echoes of Spain's Golden Age" parallelling the formality and underlying sadness he found in the paintings of Velázquez.
[11] Some critics found the ballet pallid, but Diaghilev retained a fondness for the piece, and kept it in the company's repertoire until the end of his life.
[1] The work is scored for modest orchestral forces consisting of strings and one pair each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns.
[13] The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux writes that the Pavane has become one of the composer's best-known pieces, and "there will be few to deny that it is one of the most attractive of his lesser works: the flute theme, once heard, is not easily forgotten".
[14] In a 1979 study, Robert Orledge describes the scoring of the Pavane as "delicate and airy, with some practical and inspired woodwind writing and a variety of string textures…" He adds that the strings sometimes double the viola part on either second violins or cellos, "perhaps for safety's sake".
[15] After the opening flute theme, there is a more dramatic central section, comprising a series of four-bar sequences over bass pedals which descend whole tones – a favourite device of Fauré's.
There are small and barely perceptible changes to the main theme during the work and reharmonisations that Orledge calls "a miracle of Fauréan ingenuity".
The conductor Sir Adrian Boult heard Fauré play the piano version several times and noted that he took it at a tempo no slower than 100 crotchets a minute.
Adieu donc et bons jours aux tyrans de nos coeurs!
