Four pieces for cello and piano

Romance Op.69 (1889? -1894)

Élégie Op.24 (1880)

Sicilienne Op.78 (1893-98)

Papillon Op.77 (1884)

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. If the best example among these four pieces is the earliest and the most extended of them, the Élégie in C minor, the Romance in A major is scarcely less attractive and no less authentically conceived for cello. The Romance is an arrangement, it is true, but of a work also featuring the cello, an Andante with organ accompaniment, and the solo part is much the same in the two versions. While the date of the Andante is uncertain, it could have been written in 1889, five years before the Romance and shortly after the Shylock incidental music, the Nocturne of which is based on a very similar theme. The treatment of the melodic material in the cello pieces is quite different, however. In both the Andante and the Romance it is introduced by a figure that rises dreamily from the cello’s low register and which recurs in the middle and at the end to give the piece a deeper perspective than that of    the Nocturne, lovely little piece though it is.

It is indicative of Fauré’s relationship with the cello that when he got to work on a sonata in 1880 he started with an elegiac slow movement. He tried it out at the home of his friend and mentor, Camille Saint-Saëns, and he was “greatly encouraged” he said, “to go on and do the whole sonata.” Strangely enough, 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 it has been a favourite item in the cello repertoire.

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.

Far from being an arrangement of the piece of the same name in the Pelléas et Mélisande incidental music, as is generally assumed, the Sicilienne was written in the first place, in the spring of 1893, as a piece of incidental music for Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. It was arranged for cello and piano in 1898 and incorporated in the incidental music for Maeterlinck’s play (as an entracte before the fountain scene) later in the same year. Dedicated in its cello-and-piano version to the English cellist William Squire, it is a characteristic inspiration of faintly rueful modal melody, its nostalgia constrained by the flowing sicilienne dance rhythms but showing through from time to time in the deep sighs that are naturally developed out of the thematic material.

Papillon is less characteristic. It was written, rather against the composer’s will, in 1885 to comply with his publisher’s request for a virtuoso piece to go with the Élégie and then languished unpublished for thirteen years because they could agree on a suitable title. Fauré insisted on “Pièce pour violoncello” and Hamelle on the more colourful “Papillon.” The publisher got his way in the end: “Butterfly or dung beetle,” said Fauré, “just put what you like.” If the pianist is treated a little like a dung beetle while the cellist takes fluttering flight in the opening section, the lyrical beauty of the contrasting second theme with its sympathetic left-hand piano counterpoint redeems the situation.