Fauré Nocturnes

The French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote in many genres, including songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces, and choral works. His compositions for piano, written between the 1860s and the 1920s, include some of his best known works.

Fauré's major sets of piano works are thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, six impromptus, and four valses-caprices. These sets were composed during several decades in his long career, and display the change in his style from uncomplicated youthful charm to a final enigmatic, but sometimes fiery introspection, by way of a turbulent period in his middle years. His other notable piano pieces, including shorter works, or collections composed or published as a set, are Romances sans paroles, Ballade in F♯ major, Mazurka in B♭ major, Thème et variations in C♯ major, and Huit pièces brèves. For piano duet, Fauré composed the Dolly Suite and, together with his friend and former pupil André Messager, an exuberant parody of Wagner in the short suite Souvenirs de Bayreuth.

Much of Fauré's piano music is difficult to play, but is rarely virtuosic in style. The composer disliked showy display, and the predominant characteristic of his piano music is a classical restraint and understatement.

Although for much of his career he made his living as a church organist, Fauré greatly preferred the piano. He never underestimated the challenges in composing for the instrument; he wrote, "In piano music there's no room for padding – one has to pay cash and make it consistently interesting. It's perhaps the most difficult genre of all." Although his publishers insisted on descriptive titles, Fauré said that his own preference would be for utilitarian labels such as "Piano piece No X". His works for the piano are marked by a classical French lucidity; he was unimpressed by pianistic display, commenting of keyboard virtuosi, "the greater they are, the worse they play me." Even a virtuoso such as Franz Liszt said that he found Fauré's music hard to play: at his first attempt he said to Fauré, "I've run out of fingers". Fauré's years as an organist influenced the way he laid out his keyboard works, often using arpeggiated figures, with themes distributed between the two hands, requiring fingerings more natural for organists than pianists. This tendency may have been even stronger because Fauré was ambidextrous, and he was not always inclined to follow the convention that the melody is in the right hand and the accompaniment in the left. His old friend and former teacher Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to him in 1917, "Ah! if there is a god for the left hand, I should very much like to know him and make him an offering when I am disposed to play your music; the 2nd Valse-Caprice is terrible in this respect; I have however managed to get to the end of it by dint of absolute determination."

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