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18 Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France

cries of Ehdyo, a spinning song, a Tristanesque epithalamium
and a Liebestod crossed with a Feuerzauber, when the lovers
burn to death on a gigantic pyre. You can get an idea of
the Wagnerian cast of the music from the overture-but
also of its fundamentally French quality.
Example.
Chabrier : Overture to ' Gwendoline.'
The librettist of Gwendoline and the literary champion
of Wagner in France was Catulle Mendds (a Portuguese
Jew in origin, which has a piquant side to it 1) and Mend~s
was one of the contributors to the Revue Wagndrienne, a
monthly journal planned at Munich in the summer of 1884
with the object of spreading in France knowledge of Wagner,
not so much as a musician but as ' poet, thinker and creator
of a new art-form.' The contributors were not musicians
but writers, theorists and practicians of the Symbolist avant-
garde, including Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Mallarmd.
With the Revue Wagndrienne Wagner's influence in France
entered a new stage ; and by forcing on the educated world
the knowledge of Wagner as a thinker and theorist, the
founders unwittingly prepared the way for the reaction
against what was in reality a wholly unassimiliable, indigest-
ible influence in France intellectual life.
It was in the late I88os that a name already familiar to
musicians began to assume-though as 'unassumingly' as
possible-a new importance. There was absolutely nothing
sudden or dramatic in Gabriel Faure's career. He was not
a pupil of the Conservatoire but of the Ecole Niedermeyer,
an institution founded primarily to train musicians for the
Church. It was there that Saint-Sains introduced him to
the music of Bach; and there that he got a thorough,
working knowledge of the ecclesiastical modes which
coloured his own musical idiom almost from the beginning.
Even some of his earliest songs-Lydia, Aprds un reve,
Au bord de l'eau, probably all written before ix87o-show
Faure's astonishing ability to use the conventional idiom of
the salon romance to express something personal and
original. A violin sonata in 1876, the two famous piano
quartets in I879 and 1886, the Ballade for piano and
orchestra in I881 and the growing number of songs and
piano pieces made Faure's name increasingly known to
musicians during the i88os. In fact, the composer of
Mignon, old Ambroise Thomas at the Conservatoire, under-
stood him well enough to consider him a dangerous revolu-
tionary. Faure was suggested as a possible professor at the

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