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Fauré Gabriel., Shylock, op. 57; Pelléas et Mélisande, op. 80, Pénélope: Prelude, Masques et Bergamasques , op. 112. Edited by Tait Robin. Gabriel Fauré Œuvres completes, Série IV, Volume 2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2015). lvi+208 pp. € 310.
The Complete Works critical edition that is being published by Bärenreiter-Verlag under the general direction of Jean-Michel Nectoux and Nicolas Southon is the most substantial undertaking in Gabriel Fauré scholarship to date. The significance of the new Fauré edition is that it gathers into one collection for the first time all of the music published while the composer was living, as well as previously unpublished compositions that were either unknown, incomplete or presumed lost. Additionally, the detailed critical commentaries that accompany each volume reveal a wealth of sources containing notations and corrections by Fauré and his colleagues that illuminate his composition and editorial process throughout his long and remarkably prolific career. As Nectoux suggests in the general preface,
This will give a more complete picture of Fauré’s aesthetic development, a musician who started composing when classical impulses prevailed but quickly found his own personal harmonic language which continually developed to include the boldness of Pénélope and the late chamber as well as piano works (p. viii).
Once completed, this edition – its research beginning in the 1970s – will include 29 volumes organized into seven series, of sacred and secular vocal music, stage works, chamber music, piano solos and orchestral or concertant works. (Seven volumes have been published, with the first appearing in 2010.) To complement the musical scores a catalogue of works and an iconography will also be published in the final series.
The volume under review here (the second of three volumes of Fauré’s orchestral and concertant music) was edited by Robin Tait, author of The Musical Language of Gabriel Fauré. 1 The four works it covers span 30 years: the suites Shylock, op. 57, and Pelléas et Mélisande, op. 80 (drawn from Fauré’s incidental music for the plays by Edmond Haraucourt and Maurice Maeterlinck, respectively), the concert version of the Pénélope prelude, and the suite Masques et Bergamasques, op. 112. 2 (The complete opera Pénélope will be published separately in two volumes.) Tait’s informative preface includes an overview of Fauré’s life...