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Perfect Love, Doomed Love

Donald Macleod focuses on a failed collaboration, a professorship and Faure making his mark in London.

Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Fauré's musical output. Today, a failed collaboration; a professorship; and Fauré makes his mark in London.

A 25,000-franc commission to create a music drama for the inauguration of a wealthy heiress's magnificent new music room, with one of the century's most celebrated poets as your librettist - what could possibly go wrong? In the event, the project barely got off the starting-blocks. Despite the good offices of the Princesse de Polignac - a.k.a. Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune - Fauré couldn't even agree on a subject with the eminent but ailing Paul Verlaine. So no collaboration, but Fauré did go on to set some of Verlaine's poetry to music - his song-cycle La bonne chanson, which charts the course of a perfect, immutable love, being a marvellous example. Love of the doomed, catastrophic kind was the subject-matter of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, and it drew from Fauré some of his most touching music, commissioned for a London production in 1898.

Sérénade du Bourgeois Gentilhomme ('Je languis nuit et jour')
Gérard Souzay, baritone
Dalton Baldwin, piano

La bonne chanson, Op 61
Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Ensemble Contraste

Fantaisie for flute and piano, Op 79
Michel Debost, flute
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano

Pélleas et Mélisande - Suite, Op 80
Jill Gomez, soprano
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
David Zinman, conductor

Producer: Chris Barstow.

1 hour

Music Played

  • Gabriel Fauré

    Serenade du bourgeois gentilhomme

    Performer: Dalton Baldwin. Singer: Gérard Souzay.
    • BRILLIANT : 92792.
    • BRILLIANT.
    • 30.
  • Gabriel Fauré

    La Bonne chanson Op.61

    Performer: Karine Deshayes. Performer: Ensemble Contraste.
    • ZIGZAG: ZZT110302.
    • ZIGZAG.
    • ZZT110302.
    • 5.
  • Gabriel Fauré

    Fantaisie Op.79

    Performer: Michel Debost. Performer: Jean‐Philippe Collard.
    • EMI:336126 2.
    • EMI.
    • 5.
  • Gabriel Fauré

    Pelleas et Melisande - suite Op.80

    Singer: Jill Gomez. Orchestra: Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: David Zinman.
    • PHILIPS : 446-201-2.
    • PHILIPS.
    • 9.

Broadcasts

  • Tue 22 Nov 2016 12:00
  • Tue 22 Nov 2016 18:30

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