Sixty years of friendship: can any heading in English more quickly reduce the Fourth Estate to total narcolepsy, other than perhaps “Worthwhile Canadian initiative” or “Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead”? Let us hope a few journalists do control their yawn-reflexes at such a subtitle, because this slim, beautifully rendered book justifies its hefty asking price. (A single solecism mars it: not a translator’s flaw, but a crude typo, wherein on Plate 12 “photograph” mysteriously turns into “photogrpah”.) Two leading composers from France’s Third Republic—neither famous for bare-chested self-exposure—chronicle their mutual regard via 138 letters. Born a decade apart, Saint-Saëns and Fauré considered themselves blood-brothers from the beginning. In 1862 Fauré, then seventeen, first became the twenty-seven-year-old Saint-Saëns’s pupil at Paris’ second music college, the École Niedermeyer.
From these letters emerges a Fauré already familiar from previous portrayals: urbane without fail, blandly affectionate in a feline style, an exceptionally assured creator even in his teens, but—unlike Saint-Saëns—never a child prodigy. Such is Fauré’s habitual reticence that we gain no hint here (except from the indispensable editorial notes) of his private life. In fact he womanized with cold repetitiveness while keeping his behavior a secret from most colleagues.
The real oddity comes not with Fauré’s epistles but with Saint-Saëns’s. These repeatedly flaunt a youthful skittishness wholly alien to the figure which Saint-Saëns cut during later life: that of a vituperative bully, desiccated and melancholic even in his rage—part Clemenceau, part Coriolanus. (In Cambridge to receive an honorary doctorate, he treated his hosts to a monumental snub: “Je ne parle pas anglais, sauf avec les cabmen et les waiters.”) Who hitherto would have credited Saint-Saëns with the high spirits of his missives to Fauré? Here he addresses his student as “Wretched animal,” “My fat cat,” or “My fat wolf.”
Once or twice—although debate still seethes about whether, or how often, Saint-Saëns practiced pederasty—a homoerotic note is sounded. In 1905 the seventy-year-old Saint-Saëns pens a couplet suggesting outright desire: “Handsome Gabriel, one despairs/ When one always lives in hope!” Then again, Fauré, who harbored not the slightest tendencies towards same-sex attraction, could turn on the gush also: at one point he announces that his brother has asked him to give Saint-Saëns “a kiss for your left eye.”
Elsewhere Fauré’s esteem for his mentor finds an entirely dignified voice. On several occasions Fauré helped out Saint-Saëns in his liturgical functions; both men combined long tenure as church organists with complete religious unbelief, a mixture much harder to maintain than it sounds, and one representing a constant drain on nervous energy. When appointed the Paris Conservatoire’s director in 1905, Fauré tells Saint-Saëns: “My dear Camille, since it is … to you that I owe what I am, it is entirely appropriate that the first words that I should have written on the directorial table be addressed to you!” (France’s Education Ministry soon regretted giving mild-visaged Fauré the job. He purged so many senescent or otherwise unsatisfactory Conservatoire staff that the complaint went up: “Fauré needs his daily cartload of victims, like Robespierre.”) In 1910, he assures “my dear Camille” that “you are one of the family.”
Amid the entire correspondence’s fifty-eight years’ traffic, no quarrel occurs. When Fauré produced La Bonne Chanson—his most hermetic, introspective, sensibilité-drenched piece to date—Saint-Saëns at first felt alarm (“Fauré has become completely mad!”), but afterwards conceded Fauré’s achievement. The nearest to sustained hauteur arises when Saint-Saëns, peeved at an anti-Berlioz article by Fauré in Le Figaro (1904), gives his friend sage advice:
You must know how to appreciate that which you do not like. Handel found Glück [sic] less of a musician than his [Handel’s] cook: he could see only the insufficiency of his [Gluck’s] writing, he saw neither his sense of color, nor his dramatic power. That is not how a critic must judge.
Very infrequently, as both men reach old age, Saint-Saëns reverts to his waggish young self. In 1914 he indulges in a bawdy snicker about the possible paternity (then much discussed in the press) of Cosima Wagner’s daughter Isolde: “Whatever she [Cosima] reveals, would we believe it? The mysteries of her ovaries!” More typical are the cher Maître’s embittered musical remarks. He expresses passionate distaste for Richard Strauss’s compositions—a distaste Fauré shared, on the whole—and an equally passionate enthusiasm for doing Debussy down. Scandalized in 1915 by Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir, he informs Fauré: “We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut against a man capable of such atrocities.” This plan Fauré politely ignores. One senses analogous boredom in Fauré with Saint-Saëns’s crusade (orthodox enough now, but seeming almost lunatic back then) to teach young musicians correct ornaments in baroque repertoire.
Such apathy on Fauré’s part is understandable, because by this stage he had begun to find music a torment: not through simple deafness, nor yet through tinnitus, but through a frightful auditory distortion. Apparently concealing this from Saint-Saëns, he confessed it to his wife in 1919, having attended Verdi’s Falstaff:
All I could hear were such discordantly intermingled sounds that I really thought I was going mad … low-sounding intervals get changed as they go lower, and the high-sounding intervals get changed as they get higher. Can you imagine the result of this dichotomy? It is sheer hell.
Unable to carry out any executant or administrative duties, Fauré lost his Conservatoire directorship, two years too early to qualify for a pension. Somehow the gift of composing stayed with him, even as all other musical activity became insupportable. He died in 1924, three years after Saint-Saëns. The latter’s final surviving note (although he found himself unable to keep his implied promise to retire from creative work) is a fitting valediction: “The grape harvest is over! At eighty-five, one has the right to be silent—and perhaps the duty. Toto corde, C. Saint-Saëns.”
