Fauré: Incidental Music for Caligula, Op. 52 (1888) with score

Performers: Ensemble Vocal Alix Bourbon (choir), Michel Plasson (conductor), Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse
Programme notes by Adrian Corleonis for AllMusic:
Orchestrally accompanied incidental music for plays was such a staple of the nineteenth century theater that it called upon such unlikely suppliers as Liszt, Delius, Nielsen, Chausson, d'Indy, Koechlin, and Fauré. As with nearly all nineteenth century French composers, Fauré longed to write operas -- the range of subjects he considered or sought libretti for rivals that of Debussy. In the upshot, the two operas Fauré eventually composed, Prométhée (1900) and Pénélope (1907-1912) -- to say nothing of the "scène mythologique" La naissance de Vénus (1882) -- were drawn from the legendary bourne of Greek antiquity, prefigured in their musical geste by the incidental music for Dumas père's play Caligula, for which Fauré received a commission in the summer of 1888. Staged initially at the Théâtre Française in 1837, it had a lackluster run of 20 performances, but by century's end the subject matter -- a love affair tangled in the toils of what Dumas termed "the struggle of dying Paganism against a growing faith" -- had acquired the luster of old gold. The young Dukas composed an overture inspired by Racine's Polyeucte (1892), while the final years of Fauré's contemporary, Chabrier, were given to the composition of Briséïs (a magnificent torso, libretto by Catulle Mendès, left incomplete at Chabrier's death in 1894), both works concerned with the emergence of Christianity against a pagan setting. Antiquity and paganism were enjoying a decided vogue in "the nineties," of which Pierre Louÿs' novel Aphrodite (1896), and the delicately elegiac lesbianism of his putative "translations" from ancient Greek, Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894) (set by Debussy and Koechlin), are the literary high point and most ripely articulate. By 1888, though, Fauré had composed his first violin sonata, the two piano quartets, the pavane, the first five nocturnes for piano, and a number of his best-known mélodies, he was primarily considered a salon composer -- in 1889 Chabrier could lump him together with the prolific Irish-French composer Augusta Holmès! (femme inspiratrice of Franck's erotically charged piano quintet) -- and the music for Caligula was his first stage work. Curiously, the production required music only in the first and last of five acts. As Fauré's chronicler, Jean-Michel Nectoux, noted, "The extremely refined, voluptuous atmosphere of this portrait of decadent Rome is depicted in music whose sole aim seems to be to give pleasure." Caligula opened at the Odéon on November 8, 1888, to run for 34 performances. Fauré prepared a version for full orchestra that was first performed at an SNM concert on April 6, 1889.