Fauré, Ravel & Chopin

Fauré, Ravel and Chopin

Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, who studied composition with Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire for a few years round 1900, had little in common temperamentally but much in common musically. One mutual characteristic was a love of the music of Chopin, even if it did have a different significance for each of them. For Fauré, who was thirty years older than his pupil and a member of much the same kind of Parisian musical society as that frequented by the Polish composer not so many years earlier, Chopin was a direct influence (along with Liszt and Saint-Saëns). For Ravel - whose piano music avoids such emblematic titles as Nocturne, Impromptu and Barcarolle - Chopin was a respected example rather than a model, still less a source of inspiration to him in the way that Chabrier was. Even so, while Fauré developed in his own way in spite of his career-long use of Chopinesque forms and titles, Ravel, who had studied piano with a Chopin pupil, continued to regard a Chopin technique as one of the fundamentals of his art. Preparing for the first performances of his Concerto in G in 1930, he put in hours of assiduous piano practice. Although he had left it too late and eventually had to entrust the solo role to Marguerite Long, Ravel’s remedy for his faulty technique - which was prolonged application to the studies of Chopin and Liszt - is a significant indication of the origin of his resources as a composer for the piano.