21 THÉO FOUCHENNERET The hero? This music places the performer in the situation of an initiatory quest. It can be a very long road before you find out where Fauré is heading. His writing reminds me of Marcel Proust. As you roam through its twists and turns, you end up losing your bearings and start to think in the first person, as if this music were emerging from your own mind, from the progression of your thoughts. Preludes, impromptus, barcarolles, nocturnes . . . Did Fauré take Chopin as his model? It’s true that the titles of his piano works strongly suggest he did so. But the reality is rather different. Fauré attached little importance to titles and, as his son Philippe Fauré-Fremiet tells us, he would have preferred to follow the principle of neutrality by simply numbering the pieces, thus coming closer to Schumann and his ‘Klavierstücke’ than to Chopin. Generic titles such as ‘nocturne’ were often the result of requests from his publishers, who wanted a poetic, romantic-sounding formulation to attract potential purchasers of sheet music. For instance, his first publisher, Julien Hamelle, took the initiative of renaming the last of the Pièces brèves op.84, which became Nocturne no.8.
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