Gabriel Faure: A Guide to Research.(Review)

Gabriel Faure: A Guide to Research. By Edward R. Phillips. (Composer Resource Manuals, 49.) New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. [xv, 429 p. ISBN 0-8240-7023-9. $95.]

Some myths, including a few surrounding Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), die hard.

For instance, one still occasionally finds Faure characterized as a "salon composer," a "miniaturist," or an artist of the "second rank." Yet anyone familiar with his chamber music, La bonne chanson, or Penelope recognizes the absurdity of such labels and knows that Faure takes no back seat to any contemporary. And while one rarely reads anymore that Faure's music is "too French to travel," suggestions persist that it is only for a select few, or that it is reactionary, or even that it is fundamentally ambiguous. Close examination of his oeuvre, however, reveals that Faure's distinctive style departs from the romantic and Germanic traditions, featuring a language based on the principle of allusion and the play of expectation. Finally, claims of Faure's "neglect" still come from well-meaning admirers, although this rhetorical ploy now does more to undermine Faure's image than to improve it. Before Jean-Michel Nectoux's Gabriel Faure: A Musical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), there may have been truth to this notion, but today it seems more appropriate to speak of willful ignorance than neglect. Recent essay collections, like Regarding Faure, edited by Tom Gordon (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999), certainly offer proof of a flourishing interest in the composer, as do increasing numbers of performances and recordings. Evidence for all of these assertions now may be more readily accessed, thanks to a new resource manual by Edward Phillips.

Gabriel Faure: A Guide to Research surveys the available documents pertaining to the composer. Musicians casually acquainted with Faure will be struck by the range of material it encompasses, Faure scholars will be surprised by the number of items they never knew existed, and all will be astonished by the amount of research this book represents. Its content is organized into five chapters, plus five appendixes and an author index.

Chapter 1 recites basic facts of Faure's life and reviews some of the myths that have hindered his reputation. Chapter 2, entitled "Works," begins with a tabular list of his compositions, grouped by genre and ordered by opus number; also included here are compositions without opus number and transcriptions by Faure, as well as didactic, miscellaneous, and doubtful pieces. Each title entry includes dates of composition and publication, as well as information on the original publisher and on primary sources. Following this list are the first of 1,148 bibliographic entries, including references to Faure's editions of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Robert Schumann, his music criticism, written responses to enquetes, interviews, prefaces contributed to works by others, and personal correspondence. Particularly helpful are the extensive and insightful endnotes concluding this and subsequent chapters.

Chapter 3 offers a systematic description of the extant primary sources of Faure's music--manuscripts, sketches, partial autographs, and annotated proofs--now held in libraries around the world. These sources are listed by location (ordered by country, city, library, and collection) and identified by call number and title. Phillips's descriptions of the manuscripts are extremely detailed, including information on paper, staves, foliation, binding, pagination, ink, orthography, ...