Masques et Bergamasques, Suite, Op.112

In the reduced circumstances experienced by even the most distinguished of French composers during the First World War, Fauré was duly grateful to Saint-Saëns for his part in securing    him a commission from Prince Albert I of Monaco in the summer of 1918. He was not, on the other hand, inclined to put a big creative effort into it. Asked to write the music for a one-act choreographic divertissement to a scenario by René Fauchois, he saw in it an opportunity to make use of a number of unpublished but long- cherished early pieces, supplemented where necessary by later ones or even new ones.

So what was first performed under the title of Masques et Bergamasques in Monte Carlo in April 1919 – and repeated with great success at the Opéra-Comique in Paris a year later – was a miscellany of three early instrumental pieces (Ouverture, Menuet and Gavotte), a new Pastorale, the already famous Pavane and three published songs including, crucially, Fauré’s setting of Verlaine’s Clair de lune:

Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques…

(Your soul is a choice landscape

Charmingly crossed by maskers and bergomaskers…)

Highly appropriate though it was for a poetic little fête galante inspired by Verlaine and stylishly set in a décor based on Watteau’s L’Escarpolette, the original score would clearly make little sense out of its theatrical context. In fact, Fauré had no ambition to publish anything more than a suite of the four pieces he felt would be most effective in the concert hall.

It is an indication of the faith he had in the sparkling little Ouverture – “Mozart imitating Fauré,” according to Reynaldo Hahn – that he was happy to make it inseparable from the Pastorale he composed specially for Masques et Bergamasques fifty years later. The Menuet and the Gavotte are from the same early period as the Ouverture and in the same slightly naive neo-classical spirit. The tenderly romantic Pastorale, on the other hand, is characteristic late Fauré in its harmonic and textural sophistication. At the same time, by referring back to the opening theme of the Ouverture just before recalling its own main theme for the last time, the Pastorale ensures that it will never be separated from at least one of its youthful companions.