Requiem Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Taken from the service sheet.
Gabriel Fauré, born in 1845, was appointed titular organist
a La Madeleine, Paris, in 1896 and director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1905.
Fauré started to think about the composition of a requiem in
1885 after the death of his father.
Unlike Berlioz and Verdi he removed the Dies Irae sequence, which he
considered over theatrical. Hence the
Offertorium comes up much sooner than is usual in a requiem mass setting. He permits himself only a brief reference to
the “day of wrath” in the Libera me baritone solo.
Gabriel Fauré by John Singer Sargent [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons" |
Fauré’s Requiem happily lends itself to a liturgical
performance by amateur choirs, being particularly popular with English choirs,
with the organ taking the place of the orchestra. This seems to have been
recognised early on its life, coinciding as it did with liturgical
experimentation in the Church of England in the late 19th and early
20th centuries – experiments now adopted and sanctioned for
universal use with the introduction in 1980 of the Alternative Service Book and
more recently the Common Worship services. These owe their formation to the
proposed 1928 Prayer Book and the English Missal (1933) and their structure,
including additions to the Book of Common Prayer, fit best with Fauré’s
arrangement of sections. The 1928 Prayer Book and English Missal largely
formalised a variety of liturgical practices which had been used in sung
Communion services previously.
The service is an act of worship, to include remembrance of
the departed, and may sound something like a similar service in an English church
at about the time of Faurés death in November 1924, when sections of his requiem
were sung at his funeral at La Madeleine.