A berceuse is a piece to put you to sleep – particularly if you’re a small child in a cradle. It’s usually in triple meter with a very simple tonality – wild and chromatic is just out of the question

Marcel Proust wrote to Gabriel Fauré in 1897, “Monsieur, I not only love, admire and venerate your music, I have been, still am, in love with it.” In our first episode on the magnificent nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré we found

Inspired by night, the Nocturne first came into our musical language in the 18th century, but the idea of a night-time work comes from the ancient church, where ‘nocturn’ was the last of the seven prayers of the day. Held

A good number of instrumental works, specifically pieces written for piano solo in the 19th and 20th-century, carry the title “Nocturne.” The word comes from the French, meaning “nocturnal” or “night”, and it suggests the magical atmosphere of peace and

On 4 November 2024, we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Gabriel Fauré. He might well have been the greatest master of French songs, with his settings achieving a beautiful balance of prosody, melody, harmony, and polyphony. In

In April 1919, Gabriel Fauré’s Masques et Bergamasques, a comédie musicale, with a libretto by René Fauchois, had its debut at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. From its very title, the influence of Italian commedia dell’arte, French music, and pastoral art

During his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) met France’s most important composers, including Saint-Saëns and Fauré. Once he had returned to America, Copland became an outspoken champion and advocate of Fauré’s music. He writes,

For the vast majority of his life, Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was “a man easily satisfied, happy with his friends and colleagues, lacking the taint of ruthless ambition and egotistical self-promotion characteristic of so many, and without the pretension and hollow