- Fauré originally composed this piece in 1893 as part of his incidental music to the Molière play Le bourgeois gentilhomme. His teacher Saint-Saëns had been asked to write this music, but he was too busy and offered the job to Faure instead. However, the theater went bankrupt before could perform the play with Faure’s music. Fauré later found several ways to recycle this piece.1
- Fauré published a cello and piano version of this Sicilienne in 1898, and later that year he orchestrated it for his incidental music to the Maeterlinck play Pelléas et Mélisande.2
- Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian symbolist poet and playwright.
- Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) tells the fairy-tale-esque story of Princess Melisande, who tragically falls in love with Pelléas, her husband’s younger brother.3
Sources
- Jean-Michel Nectoux, trans. Roger Nichols, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147.
- 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.
- “Maurice Maeterlinck,” Encyclopædia Brittanica (August 25, 2019), accessed September 26, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maurice-Maeterlinck.
Cut IDs
15411 15682 18217 21531 41257