page_title: Piano music of Gabriel Fauré
section_title: For two pianists
hierarchical_section_title: Piano music of Gabriel Fauré / For two pianists
caption_attribution_description: English: André Messager - caricature in crayon by Gabriel Fauré.
context_page_description: The French composer Gabriel Fauré wrote in many genres, including songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces, and choral works. 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.
context_section_description: Souvenirs de Bayreuth
  Subtitled Fantasie en forme de quadrille sur les thèmes favoris de l'Anneau de Nibelung ("Fantasy in the form of a quadrille on favourite themes from Der Ring des Nibelungen"). Fauré admired the music of Wagner and was familiar with the smallest details of his scores, but he was one of the few composers of his generation not to come under Wagner's musical influence.
  From 1878, Fauré and his friend and ex-pupil André Messager made trips abroad to see Wagner operas. They saw Das Rheingold and Die Walküre at Cologne Opera; the complete Ring cycle in Munich and London; and Die Meistersinger in Munich and at Bayreuth, where they also saw Parsifal. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth, written in about 1888. This short, skittish piano work for four hands sends up themes from The Ring. It consists of five short sections in which Wagner's themes are transformed into dance rhythms. The manuscript (in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris) is in Messager's hand.
  Suite d'orchestre, Op. 20
  Between 1867 and 1873, Fauré wrote a symphonic work for full orchestra. The piece was first heard in 1873 when Fauré and Saint-Saëns performed it in a two-piano version, but that transcription has not survived. Léon Boëllmann made a new transcription of the first movement in 1893.
  Dolly Suite, Op. 56
  The Dolly Suite is a six-section work for piano duet. It was inspired by Hélène, nicknamed "Dolly", daughter of the singer Emma Bardac with whom Fauré was intimately associated in the 1890s. The opening piece was a present for Dolly's first birthday, and Fauré added the other five pieces to mark her subsequent birthdays and other family occasions. Unusually for Fauré, who generally favoured strictly functional titles, the movements of the suite have whimsical titles associated with Dolly and her family.
  Its six movements take about fifteen minutes to perform. The first is a Berceuse, or cradle-song. "Mi-a-ou", despite a title suggesting a cat, in fact represents the infant Dolly's attempts to pronounce the name of her brother Raoul; after "Le jardin de Dolly", the "Kitty Valse", again confounds its feline title, being a sketch of the family's pet dog. After the gentle "Tendresse", the suite ends with a lively evocation of Spain, which, Orledge notes, is one of Fauré's few purely extrovert pieces.
  Masques et bergamasques, Op. 112
  From the orchestral suite drawn from his music for the stage presentation Masques et bergamasques, Fauré made a transcription for piano duet, which was published in 1919. Like the orchestral suite, it consists of four movements, titled "Ouverture", "Menuet", "Gavotte" and "Pastorale".
caption: Caricature by Fauré of his friend and co-composer of Souvenirs de Bayreuth, André Messager
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