Uploaded July 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

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-Composer: Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924)
-Orchestra: English Sinfonia
-Conductor: Sir Charles Groves

Masques et Bergamasques, Suite for Orchestra, op. 112, written in 1919

00:00 - I. Ouverture
03:49 - II. Menuet
06:50 - III. Gavotte
10:19 - IV. Pastorale

Fauré's last, inwardly turning manner -- spare, abrupt, arching toward ever finer gradations of luminosity -- had been embarked upon for more than a decade when Prince Albert I of Monaco asked him in 1918 (at Saint-Saëns' prompting) for a brief divertissement to be performed at the Monte Carlo theater, which would become known as Masques et bergamasques. In collaboration with theater director Raoul Gunsbourg and René Fauchois, librettist of Pénélope, Fauré was to provide music for a fête galant in the spirit of Verlaine, drawing largely upon his earlier works. In the upshot, only the orchestrated version of the mélodie Clair de lune, from 1888, contained verse by "the Faun" (as Verlaine was known to his café cronies), though the Pavane for chorus and orchestra of 1887 featured lines by Count Robert de Montesquiou deliberately imitative of Verlaine's style. Madrigal for chorus and orchestra (1884) and the mélodie Le plus doux chemin (1904) to poems by Armand Silvestre dovetailed well with the spirit of the thing. The slender conceit of the scenario, in which the commedia del arte characters who flit through Verlaine's early verse appear in person to observe and mock the eighteenth century lords and ladies accustomed to being entertained by them, owes as much to Watteau -- who inspired the décor -- as to the poet.

For the Overture and two orchestral numbers, Fauré revised movements of an abandoned symphony dating from 1869 -- his 24th year -- to which he added a Pastorale, the only newly composed music for Masques et bergamasques. The latter revives his galant style with a loving, old-masterly touch. While the Overture is not pastiche, the young Fauré was obviously moved by classical models -- Reynaldo Hahn disarmingly suggested "Mozart imitating Fauré." Likewise, the Gavotte and Menuet were inspired by an even more remote era. Following the horrors of the Great War, and taken together, the oddments of this elegant trifle loomed larger than their sum. They still evoke a grand nostalgia, not merely for the belle époque, but for the eternally enchanted paysages that haunt Verlaine's early verse. And the freshly felicitous first orchestral essays, indeed, seem predestined for just this use. The Pastorale was Fauré's last orchestral work -- in its brief magic there is something of Prospero's "Our revels now are ended." The Monte Carlo production opened April 10, 1919, scoring an immediate success, which led to it being re-staged at the Paris Opéra-Comique on March 4, 1920. As a theater piece, Masques et bergamasques has frequently been revived in France, while the suite of orchestral numbers drawn from it -- Overture, Gavotte, Menuet, and Pastorale -- has achieved an enduring popularity the world over.
[allmusic.com]