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Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France I 9

Conservatoire. ' Faur6 ? ' said the old man. ' Never. If he is
nominated I resign.' Apart from never having won the
Prix de Rome nor even having studied at the Conservatoire,
Fauri showed in everything he wrote a subversive freedom
with regard to both tonality and harmonic grammar. In the
Requiem of x888 and the settings of Verlaine of 1890-92 he
not only achieved perfection of style in his own particular
manner ; he also inaugurated something like a new approach
to music. After the conscious emotionalism of the Franck-
istes and Wagnerians-or rather parallel to these-Faur6
aimed at an altogether less emphatic, less literary art.
Duparc had defined the approach of the Franck circle in a
nutshell-' Je veux 6tre emu.' Faure's appeal is different:
he solicits rather than demands attention and for that
reason he was never a party-leader in the musical world.
Like Mozart, he accepted the conventions of his day. His
Barcarolles, Nocturnes, Impromptus and Valses Caprices
are, superficially, the drawing room pieces of the '8os and
'90s; he refused to publish his only symphony and never
wrote one of the fashionable symphonic poems. This
instinctive preference for the smaller forms and for an
unemphatic manner was an unconscious return to an earlier
French tradition and though Faur6's piano style grew from
Chopin and Schumann the effect on the listener is often
more like that made by the clavecinistes' music. No wonder
that Faure found inspiration in the poems of Verlaine whose
art podtique seems to envisage an art in many ways so
similar-nothing fixed or stable, the chanson grise on the
borderland between vagueness and precision, and nuance
rather than colour.
Illustration: 'Pavane,' by Faurd
In a sense Faure's music prepared the way for Debussy,
who was to carry the revolution in the composer's approach
to music to its logical conclusion and inaugurate a new era
not in French music only but throughout Western Europe
and beyond. That story lies outside my field to-day,
except in its earliest stages ; and in any case there is another
important strand in the complex make-up of French
musical life which We must consider first. Vincent d'Indy
virtually discovered folk-music for himself in I885, when
he walked through the mountains of his beloved Vivarais,
and the result was not only the Symphonie cdvdnole but a
new phase in his whole musical style, a turning at least
partially away from Wagner and a conscious return to
French musical origins. But he was by no means the first.

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