In his early 50s, Gabriel Fauré finally began to enjoy the recognition at home in France and abroad that had eluded him during his long decades working in obscurity as an organist, choirmaster and piano teacher. He began to teach composition at the Paris Conservatory, and he cultivated patrons in places like London, where he was introduced to a distinguished actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Despite the very tight deadline, Fauré accepted Campbell’s invitation to compose incidental music for an upcoming production: the first English staging of Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck.

From the moment it premiered in Paris in 1893, Pelléas et Mélisande became an icon of the Symbolist movement, which sought to use the surface level of words and their phonetic sounds to expose deeper, seemingly inexpressible layers of truth and feeling. Debussy, a Symbolist acolyte, began that same year to convert the play into an opera, although it took until 1902 for his version to reach the stage. And Debussy was in fact Campbell’s first choice for the incidental music, but he declined, leading to Fauré’s late involvement. (The list of great composers who engaged with Pelléas et Mélisande continued to expand, with Schoenberg creating a symphonic poem in 1903 and Sibelius producing another suite of incidental music in 1905.)

Using orchestrations prepared by his student Charles Koechlin, Fauré conducted the musical numbers that contributed to a well-received London production. He went on to re-orchestrate several selections for a slightly larger orchestra to create the Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, initially heard in a three-movement version in 1901, and later expanded to the four-movement version played here.

-Copyright Aaron Grad 2018

Originally performed November 16, 2018.