Pavane, Op. 50

• Fauré originally composed this piece for orchestra and optional chorus in 1887. He created several versions: one for piano solo in 1889, and one for SATB and piano in 1891.¹
• Fauré dedicated this piece to the Countess Greffuhle, a prominent lady in Parisian high society, because she offered to produce the work in the manner Fauré envisioned: as an accompaniment to a dance performance, with the orchestra and singers hidden.²
  • The vocal versions feature a text by Count R. de Montesquiou³ (1855-1921), the Countess’s cousin. Montesquiou was a French poet, dilettante and patron of the arts. He was friends with many of the artists, composers, and writers of his time, and novelists including Marcel Proust based characters on him.⁴
• The Pavane became part of the Ballet Russes repertoire in 1917, with choreography by Massine. Diaghilev had asked Fauré to compose a new ballet for the Ballet Russes, but the outbreak of WWI interrupted the plan, and they used the Pavane instead.
  • Massine’s ballet entitled Las Meninas, after the painting by Velásquez, because in the Pavane Massine heard “haunting echoes of Spain’s Golden Age.”⁵
• Fauré’s Pavane provided a model for Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess (1899). Ravel composed his pavane while he was a student in Fauré’s Paris Conservatoire composition class.⁶

“elegant…but otherwise not important.”

Fauré’s modest opinion about this work.⁷

1. Jean-Michel Nectoux, “Fauré, Gabriel,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed September 26, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000009366.
2. Jean-Michel Nectoux, trans. Roger Nichols, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108.
3. Nectoux, “Fauré, Gabriel,” Grove Music Online.
4. “Parfumeries & Robert de Montesquiou,” Non Solus Blog, University of Illinois Library, accessed September 26, 2019, https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/2011/06/17/parfumeries-robert-de-montesquiou/.
5. Leslie Norton, Leonide Massine and the 20^th Century Ballet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), 25.
6. Nectoux, trans. Nichols, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, 109.
7. Quoted in Nectoux, trans. Nichols, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, 109.