About this Piece

In 1905, Gabriel Fauré assumed the position of Director of the Paris Conservatoire. The post gave him widespread exposure and brought some fame to his music but also left him somewhat overloaded. After World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, he was less able to travel, and he found that he had more time to devote to writing new pieces. Fauré claimed to be resistant to many of the premonitions of modernism found in the music of fellow French composers like Debussy and Ravel. Indeed, much of what he wrote up until his death in 1924 was in a touching though slightly distant late-Romantic style: His works tend to display long, satisfying melodies; colorful, chromatic harmonies; and relatively clear, classical forms. But some of his pieces from the 1910s involve the changeable characters, rhythmic instability, and melodic fragmentation that we have come to associate with music of the early 20th century. 

Fauré started his First Cello Sonata in May 1917 and completed it over the summer while on a retreat to southeastern France with his partner Marguerite Hasselmans. He dedicated the piece to her brother Louis Hasselmans—a conductor, cellist, and good friend of the composer—though the work was first performed at the concert series of the Société Nationale de Musique by Gérard Hekking and Alfred Cortot. He had written several shorter works for the cello earlier in his career, including the famous Élégie, which started its life in 1880 as the slow movement of a never-finished multi-movement composition and has become a milestone piece for advanced cello students. The D-minor Cello Sonata is of a very different nature: flighty, with rough edges and unpredictable movement forms. It captures some of the horror and uncertainty of its year of composition, as well as the modernist tendencies that crept into Fauré’s music toward the end of his career. 

For the opening theme of his First Cello Sonata, Fauré reached back to a symphony he had attempted to write in the 1880s and then discarded. In its original form, the melody is a swashbuckling orchestral statement with accents on every note, but in this late sonata, the tune is placed over ambiguous rhythms and given a tense, pointillistic quality. The music remains unsettled in terms of pulse and harmony until the very end of the movement, when, in a striking coda, the cello repeats a fluttering bass figure, which the piano casts in alternately diabolical and angelic shades. In the second movement, the cello plays a continuous line that hardly ever resolves, while Fauré toys with a seemingly infinite variety of piano accompaniment rhythms and textures. The composer apparently struggled to come up with an ending to the piece. He decided on an easygoing Allegro commodo in D major, with a plaintive melody whose rhythmic articulations sound almost like speech. —N.S.