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The French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote in many genres, including songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces, and choral works.〔Jones, p. 8〕 His compositions for piano, written between the 1860s and the 1920s, include some of his best known works. Fauré's major sets of piano works are thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, six impromptus, and four valses-caprices. These sets were composed during several decades in his long career, and display the change in his style from uncomplicated youthful charm to a final enigmatic, but sometimes fiery introspection, by way of a turbulent period in his middle years. His other notable piano pieces, including shorter works, or collections composed or published as a set, are ''Romances sans paroles'', Ballade in F major, Mazurka in B major, ''Thème et variations'' in C major, and ''Huit pièces brèves''. For piano duet, Fauré composed the ''Dolly Suite'' and, together with his friend and former pupil André Messager, an exuberant parody of Wagner in the short suite ''Souvenirs de Bayreuth''. Much of Fauré's piano music is difficult to play, but is rarely virtuosic in style. The composer disliked showy display, and the predominant characteristic of his piano music is a classical restraint and understatement. ==Introduction== Although for much of his career he made his living as a church organist, Fauré greatly preferred the piano.〔Nectoux (1991), p. 41〕 He never underestimated the challenges in composing for the instrument; he wrote, "In piano music there's no room for padding – one has to pay cash and make it constantly interesting. It's perhaps the most difficult medium of all."〔''Quoted'' in Howat (2009), p. 324〕 Although his publishers insisted on descriptive titles, Fauré said that his own preference would be for utilitarian labels such as "Piano piece No X". His works for the piano are marked by a classical French lucidity;〔Slonimsky, Nicholas. ("Fauré, Gabriel (-Urbain)", ) ''Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians'', Schirmer Reference, New York, 2001, accessed 8 September 2010 〕 he was unimpressed by pianistic display, commenting of keyboard virtuosi, "the greater they are, the worse they play me."〔Nectoux (1991), p. 379〕 Even a virtuoso such as Franz Liszt said that he found Fauré's music hard to play: at his first attempt he said to Fauré, "I've run out of fingers".〔Nectoux (1991), p. 51〕 Fauré's years as an organist influenced the way he laid out his keyboard works, often using arpeggiated figures, with themes distributed between the two hands, requiring fingerings more natural for organists than pianists.〔Jones, p. 51.〕 This tendency may have been even stronger because Fauré was ambidextrous, and he was not always inclined to follow the convention that the melody is in the right hand and the accompaniment in the left. His old friend and former teacher Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to him in 1917, "Ah! if there is a god for the left hand, I should very much like to know him and make him an offering when I am disposed to play your music; the 2nd Valse-Caprice is terrible in this respect; I have however managed to get to the end of it by dint of absolute determination."〔Nectoux and Jones, pp. 118–119〕 As a man, Fauré was said to possess "that mysterious gift that no other can replace or surpass: charm",〔Morrison, p. 14〕 and charm is a conspicuous feature of many of his early compositions.〔 His early piano works are influenced in style by Chopin,〔 and throughout his life he composed piano works using similar titles to those of Chopin, notably nocturnes and barcarolles.〔 An even greater influence was Schumann, whose piano music Fauré loved more than any other.〔Nectoux (1991), p. 43〕 The authors of ''The Record Guide'' (1955) wrote that Fauré learnt restraint and beauty of surface from Mozart, tonal freedom and long melodic lines from Chopin, "and from Schumann, the sudden felicities in which his development sections abound, and those codas in which whole movements are briefly but magically illuminated."〔Sackville-West, pp. 263–64〕 When Fauré was a student at the École Niedermeyer his tutor had introduced him to new concepts of harmony, no longer outlawing certain chords as "dissonant". By using unresolved mild discords and colouristic effects, Fauré anticipated the techniques of Impressionist composers.〔 In later years Fauré's music was written under the shadow of the composer's increasing deafness, becoming gradually less charming and more austere, marked by what the composer Aaron Copland called "intensity on a background of calm."〔 The critic Bryce Morrison has noted that pianists frequently prefer to play the accessible earlier piano works, rather than the later music, which expresses "such private passion and isolation, such alternating anger and resignation" that listeners are left uneasy.〔Morrison, p. 7〕 The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux writes: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Piano music of Gabriel Fauré」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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