Élégie Op.24 (1880)

Fauré and the cello are well suited. No instrument is better equipped to express the brooding, inward quality that is characteristic of so much of his music. That is presumably why, on getting to work on a Sonata for cello and piano in 1880, he started with the elegiac slow movement. Certainly, it was well received when he tried it out at the home of his friend and mentor, Camille Saint-Saëns, and was “greatly encouraged,” he said, “to go on and do the whole Sonata.” Strangely enough, however, although he eventually did write two Cello Sonatas, he never got any further with this early project and in 1883 he published the Molto adagio as a separate piece called Élégie. Since then, both in the original version with piano and in the orchestral arrangement the composer made a dozen years later, it has been a favourite item in the cello repertoire.

The opening section is pure melody, its sadly drooping line carried by the cello against chords repeated in an even rhythm in the strings and, a little later, a discreet counterpoint on flute. The new idea introduced by clarinet after a change of the accompanying figuration to a rippling legato, though consolatory in harmony, is no less poignant in effect. In fact, it provokes a passionate outburst from the orchestra and a dramatic cadenza from the cello. The soloist recalls the opening lament even more expressively than before and, in spite of the intervention of a clear memory of the second theme on woodwind, ultimately proves himself inconsolable.

When Fauré was working on what he thought would be his first cello sonata in 1880 he had no doubts at all - unlike Brahms in similar circumstances fifteen years earlier - about including a full-scale slow movement. In fact he wrote the slow movement first. The rest of the sonata having failed to materialise in the meantime, he had it published separately as the Élégie Op.24 in 1883. The last piece in which Fauré was to be so outspokenly emotional, it certainly justifies its elegiac title.

An extraordinary feature of the Élégie is the long series of repeated chords in even rhythm in the piano part. Fauré had recently done something similar in Après un rêve but with a very different effect and with nothing like the emphatically tragic intensity of the opening of the Élégie. The same rhythm persists, though in a variety of dynamic colourings and piano registers, throughout the first section as the cello introduces and then broods on the sadly down-curving main theme of the work. So the eventual change of piano figuration to a rippling legato renders the change of harmony and the entry of a consolatory new melody on the piano all the more poignant. A dramatic joint cadenza leads to a recall of the opening lament by a passionately agitated piano and a cello which, in spite of the intervention of a clear memory of the second theme, ultimately proves itself inconsolable.

Dedicated to the cellist Jules Loëb, the Élégie was first performed in public by the composer and the dedicatee at a concert of the Société Nationale in Paris in December 1883.