Cello Sonata No.2 in G minor Op.117 (1921)

Shortly after the first performance of Fauré’s Second Cello Sonata, which took place on the day after his 77th birthday, his friend and colleague Vincent d’Indy told him he was enchanted by the work, adding “Ah, how lucky you are to remain so young!” Fauré must have been particularly pleased by that comment since his health had gone into serious decline when he had started work on the Sonata and he had had to cut short his time in the country and return to Paris. “It’ really irritating to be old!” he said. “But when I start work again I’ll notice it less.”

If the vigour of the first movement is anything to go by, he didn’t notice it at all. The canonic presentation of the main theme in G minor has a youthful impatience about it and the second subject, introduced by piano alone in right hand octaves, a positive elation. It is true that the textures are more economical and the harmonies harder-edged than a younger Fauré would have liked. But the way the urgency is sustained to the end of the movement – through a canonic development, a false recapitulation, more development and a recapitulation that firmly settles in the major – is an indication of immense creative energy.

One reason why Fauré wrote a second Cello Sonata only four or five years after the first could be that he wanted to make further use of a Chant funéraire he had been commissioned to provide for a commemoration of the centenary of the centenary of Napoleon’s death at the Hôtel des Invalides in 1921. Perhaps it reminded him of the Elégie he had written in 1880 as the slow movement of a cello sonata but had eventually published separately. Certainly, although it betrays its origins in its funereal harmonies and the persistent slow-march tread of crotchets in the piano part, it makes a highly effective sonata movement – and a particularly apposite here in that the second subject, initially presented in A flat major by the cello, is recalled to secure a C major ending to a movement that began in C minor.

The Allegro vivo finale follws a similar progression, in this case from a G minor agitated by syncopated rhythms in the opening theme to a joyous G major ending. On the way it offers distant echoes, twice in each case, of two recent works, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin in the harmonies of the chorale-like second subject and Debussy’s Cello Sonata in a capricious episode featuring pizzicato cello.