Sempre Dolce

Gabriel Faure

In the waning days of vinyl's supremacy (though hardly the end of my new-and-used vinyl collecting), I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, a mail-order classical music catalogue that issued a mixed bag of European classics in plain packaging at reasonable rates. It's the label where I discovered this essential Satie collection, had my first exposure to the string quartets of Ravel and Debussy and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe, and this quaint A.A. Milne anthology, among others.

Two MHS releases I especially cherished, now lost to time and entirely unavailable in digital form, were a pair of double live albums that captured eclectic concerts by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. One was heavy on Hugo Wolf songs and some exquisite harp music by Debussy and Britten, and the other, titled Three Centuries of Chamber Music, featured at its soft center, between the bookends of Haydn and Elliott Carter, a lengthy, intoxicating Fauré idyll: the ageless Dolly Suite, in piano-duet form, and "two pieces for flute & piano." These were his Sicilienne and Fantasie, Op. 78-79, and together these two minor-key sort-of-waltzes put me into a rainy-day reverie (no matter the weather) that I can still palpably call to mind. Something about the combination of the supple liveness of the recording, and the physical memory of putting my needle down on that LP, makes it...let's just say it stirs a pang akin to that evoked by a lost relationship. 

Though I no longer have that recording (it featured Paula Robison on flute), this isn't a bad approximation (many other renditions I've found online take the tempo way too fast). And while the Fantasie is a beguiling beauty with some teasing dissonances, the Sicilienne—oh, the Sicilienne. From the rolling 6/8 figure that begins it, with its strong snap on the third and sixth beat, to the flashes of rippling major-key sunshine that upend its brooding minor key, to the long chordal suspensions of its middle section, it's a perfect, and perfectly gorgeous miniature that swells into a whole landscape, like a snow globe contemplated in close-up. It's all there in the opening (this is from a solo piano arrangement, to which I've added chords to show the harmony). We start with this arching melody in G-minor, with a turn to a C7 and a D-minor:

The next phrase seals the deal: Watch how the alternating waltz of B-flat major and C-major in the first measure below unfolds upward into a blazing D-major chord. If this dancing climb doesn't lift your heart a bit when you hear it, see a doctor.

Then comes a more tentative but no less lovely second section, kicking off with a mildly startling B-natural on top and running through a series of smudgy, suggestive extended chords with a tight, chromatic melody—minor-sevenths, sixths, etc.

This is followed by an insistent, dramatic section heavy on both extended and diminished chords (the first two are F9 and Gm6, followed by an A7 with a flat 9):

And finally, before a return to the opening melody, there is what I think of as the lingering section, which brings the dance to an abrupt halt to noodle around just two chords, E-flat and B-flat, for several measures before curling back up to the F9 of the dramatic section above (this section is too long to represent with a pic of the score; you can hear this restful section begin at 1:44 in the video below).

Originally composed for a stage production, this and the Fantasie also exist in a popular cello-and-piano version, remarkably in the same key, which brings out the piece's darker colors to searing effect. I love both versions but reserve a special place in my heart for Robison's singing flute, which once lit my imagination in a way not just a single piece of music but only a particular recording—especially one I could cradle in my hand and set spinning—could do. Obviously Fauré did not write the piece to illustrate my sadness over the loss of my vinyl records, and with them a whole way of loving music. But the capacious and delicate melancholy of the Sicilienne provides plenty of room for whatever sorry-grateful meditation you care to bring to it.