Reimagining Fauré’s Solo Vocal Music: New Editions and Recordings of the Songs and Vocalises

Abstract

If familiarity does not always breed contempt, it can obscure the full range of meanings inherent in the object it contemplates. This is certainly true of the songs of Gabriel Fauré, which remain a mainstay of the education of young singers and of the canon of art song. Fauré's songs (mélodies) generate for many a sense of personal attachment and even ownership. One need look only, to take one example, at the heated comments on YouTube that follow videos of Philippe Jaroussky and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa performing the perennial Fauré favourite 'Nell', to be reminded of this. 1 The burning issue in this case is tempo: 'Too fast!' cry the detractors, and they certainly have a case given the very slow metronome mark that 'Nell' has carried ever since the first edition, which seems at odds with the music and unduly taxing for the singer. While such YouTube comments are hardly a scientific measure of opinion, they reflect a broader truth familiar to any modern classical musician, namely that the concept of textual fidelity, even if imperfectly understood and sometimes applied too literally, matters to many beyond the scholarly community and affects the ways in which this music lives on in performance today. It is difficult to predict, of course, how far any new critical edition can turn back the tide of performance traditions based on earlier texts, or indeed those stemming 1

The Aesthetic Education Function of Digital Information Resources in the Teaching of Ethnic Vocal Music in Colleges and Universities Based on Big Data

“…Now, with the carrier of the Internet, data is naturally explosive growth. The data volume will reach nearly 11ZB, and by the end of next year, the data scale will explode to 44 times the current [8][9]. The era of big data has special significance for enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions.…”