What is so original about this Sixth Nocturne, and what’s your approach to it? It’s trompe-l’œil music, music that doesn’t respect the laws of gravity. It gives the illusion of weightlessness. The textures are held together as if by magic, blending together in such a way that you can’t separate them. The triple-time passage is heard as if it were in duple time. Rhythmic and harmonic markers are disrupted and disturbed: the first beats of the bar are evasive, notions of strong and weak beats vanish, angles are blurred, ‘the imprecise passes its stump2 over the precise’ as Jankélévitch so aptly put it! The initial melody, which doesn’t begin on a strong beat, is like a long, suspended thread. To support this music and unify its various sequences, I opted to follow the composer’s tempo markings as closely as possible. Further on, the dreamy semiquaver passage in the treble calls for a fast tempo, with the ‘levitating’ upper melodic line supported by a half-pedal. When the initial theme reappears in the coda, the impression of suspension returns. This Sixth Nocturne is a masterpiece. I can’t resist recounting the anecdote attached to it: when a lady asked him in which splendid landscape he had found the inspiration for it, Fauré replied ‘in the Simplon Tunnel’! 27 THÉO FOUCHENNERET
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