Gabriel Fauré: 'Sicilienne' (flute & piano).

   • willie-whistleblower  

The well-known 'Sicilienne' Opus 78 originally composed for 'cello and piano in 1898 and later that year adapted for the Suite 'Pelléas and Mélisande'. Happily Henri Büsser and other composers made arrangements for flute and piano.
Originally marked 'Andantino' (50 dotted crotchets to the minute) changed later to 'Allegretto molto moderato' for the orchestral version.

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845 –1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher, born in Pamiers, near Toulouse.
He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his 'Pavane', 'Requiem', 'Sicilienne', 'Nocturnes' for piano and the songs 'Après un rêve' and 'Clair de lune'. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.

Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a small boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the Ecole Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including a premier prix in composition for the Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition.
Success came to him in middle age, in form of the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire. Lacking time for composing, he retreated to the countryside in his summer holidays to concentrate on composition. By his final years, he enjoyed recognition as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic. Outside France and Britain, where he was greatly admired, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted.

Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of his (Faurés) death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, describes him as 'the most advanced composer of his generation in France', and notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast to the charm of his earlier music, his later works can be elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

(Fauré was in London for the premiere of Elgar's First Symphony in 1908 and dined with the composer. Elgar later wrote to their mutual friend Frank Schuster that Fauré "was such a real gentleman – the highest kind of Frenchman and I admired him greatly." Elgar tried to get Fauré's Requiem put on at the 'Three Choirs Festival', but it did not finally have its English premiere until 1937, nearly fifty years after its first performance in France. Composers from other countries also loved and admired Fauré. In the 1880s Tchaikovsky had thought him "adorable"; Albéniz and Fauré were friends and correspondents until the former's early death in 1909; Richard Strauss sought his advice; and in Fauré's last years, the young American Aaron Copland was a devoted admirer.).