Faculty Tuesdays

Gabriel Fauré’s cycle of nine songs, “La bonne chanson” (The Good Song or The Right Song), ends with these words: “Let summer come! And let fall and winter come again! Every season will be sweet to me, O Beloved, adorned as you are by this fantasy and this reason!” Fauré’s musical legacy oscillates between these axes: fantasy, dissolving dream worlds of nature, love and loss, and reason, the strict standards of perfection to which he aspired in his musical craft. Yet pure reason cannot delimit even the compositional skills that Fauré, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, won through rigorous training and rational labor. Fauré’s art thrives on ineffable margins, for which Aaron Copland coined the word “ungetatable.” The Spanish poet Gerardo Diego put it even better when he said, “His music has the impossible geometry of a curve with no formula for its continuation, made from a series of infinite tangents.”

The program’s first half focuses on Fauré’s later music, including the hallucinatory twelfth nocturne, the puckish eighth barcarolle and the second cello sonata. The second half offers his earlier work from the 1880s and 1890s, associated with symbolism and the poetry of Paul Verlaine. “La Bonne Chanson,” in Fauré’s London arrangement for string quintet, voice and piano, brings the program to a close: it is a cycle of joy and positive expectation in stark contrast to the more characteristic mood of misery and desolation in German songs cycles about love. These songs were a gift to his mistress, Emma Bardac, and posterity.

Renowned CU Boulder College of Music faculty artists perform with students and colleagues in chamber music recitals featuring world premieres and beloved classics. Join us for this free series in person at Grusin Music Hall or via livestream most Tuesdays August through March.

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