The "Sicilienne" is among Gabriel Fauré's most
familiar pieces; it began life as an orchestral sketch
in March 1893, intended as incidental music for a
revival of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Paul
Porel's Eden-Théâtre. Left incomplete as that
establishment went bankrupt, Fauré rounded it off and
arranged it for cello and piano only in 1898, even as
he passed the score along to his pupil Charles Koechlin
to orchestrate as an item in the incidental music for a
London production of Ma...(+)
The "Sicilienne" is among Gabriel Fauré's most
familiar pieces; it began life as an orchestral sketch
in March 1893, intended as incidental music for a
revival of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Paul
Porel's Eden-Théâtre. Left incomplete as that
establishment went bankrupt, Fauré rounded it off and
arranged it for cello and piano only in 1898, even as
he passed the score along to his pupil Charles Koechlin
to orchestrate as an item in the incidental music for a
London production of Maeterlinck's Pelléas et
Mélisande, where it introduces the scene at the
beginning of Act Two, in which Mélisande's wedding
ring slips from her finger and disappears into a well
as she plays gently with Pelléas -- a use for which it
seems predestined. In this form it was first heard with
the play's opening at the Prince of Wales' Theatre on
June 21, 1898, with Fauré conducting. Given its
effectiveness, it was inevitable that Fauré should
have included it among the four numbers of his Pelléas
et Mélisande Suite, heard for the first time on
December 1, 1912, conducted by André Messager. The
common practice of publishers in issuing multiple
arrangements of works likely to catch on -- for piano,
or piano and solo instrument -- ensured that the
Sicilienne's lilting wistfulness would become known
around the world in the version for cello and piano,
published in London by Metzler and Hamelle in Paris in
1898. Like a zephyr, the Sicilienne, with its
hypnotically fluid melody carried, as it were, on waves
of soothing arpeggiation, evokes a mood of mildly
delirious nostalgia. If all music, as Vladimir
Jankélévitch has remarked, is nostalgic in a certain
manner, the Sicilienne is nostalgic music par
excellence, for it embodies a truly existential, or
perhaps mysterious, yearning for some undefined,
imagined place, a Sicily in the luxuriant realm of
dreams.
Although originally written for Cello and Piano, I
arranged his work for Flute and Piano.
, 17 Nov 2016 at 09:47 
SHEET MUSIC