Faure’s extremely popular Masques et bergamasques Suite has a long and rich compositional history, and each stage in its creation has left its mark on this marvelous piece. In 1918, Prince Albert of Monaco commissioned the venerable Gabriel Fauré to write a “choreographic divertissement” for the Monte Carlo Theater – a series of short-ish pieces for dance, singing, and entertainment. Fauré, at 73, was still busy directing the Paris Conservatoire and was battling a curious form of deafness that warped pitches. With little free time to create an entirely new set of pieces, Fauré composed the work by expanding his earlier 1902 Fêtes galantes (“Grand parties”) that he had based on the 1869 set of poems (also titled Fêtes galantes) by French poet Paul Verlaine. To that initial kernel, Fauré added several more pieces – songs, instrumental pieces, and dance movements – creating a Divertissement that had a total of eight short pieces, some brand new and some previously written.

The program for the 1919 performance of Divertissement at the Monte Carlo Theater describes the inspiration for the work,
especially for the numbers that included dance, as coming from the Italian Commedia dell’arte:

“…The characters Harlequin, Gilles and Colombine,
whose task is usually to amuse the aristocratic audience,
take their turn at being spectators at a ‘Fêtes galantes’ on
the island of Cythera. The lords and ladies, who as a rule
applaud their efforts, now unwittingly provide them with
entertainment by their coquettish behavior.”

Encouraged by the enormous success of the Monte Carlo performance, Fauré soon after created a four-piece suite extracting the purely instrumental pieces from that Divertissement. This revised suite had its premiere in 1919 called Masques et Bergamasques Suite – its title evoking a masked ball with folk dances as a mashed-up pun on French and Italian Renaissance dance music. Significantly, the title is taken from a line in Verlaine’s dreamy poem Clair de lune of 1869 – which ties this Suite explicitly back to the Fêtes galantes by Verlaine of 1869, and then through Faure’s own 1902 Fêtes galantes music inspired by Verlaine’s poems, through the Monte Carlo Divertissement that adapted his Fêtes galantes, and finally to this Masques and Bergamasques Suite arising from the Divertissement. The first stanza:

“Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques,
Jouant du luth et dansant, et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantastiques!”

(Your soul is a chosen landscape,
that masquers and revelers will charm,
playing the lute and dancing, and almost
sad beneath their fantastical disguises!).

Fauré’s music for this “entertainment” was meant to be like a hidden camera on the aristocrats’ reveling. Emotionally, though, the music strives to portray a deeper pathos underneath the polished veneer of exquisite melodies that drive the festivities, as Verlaine attempted in his Decadent-era poetry.

The Ouverture begins in a sprint with jubilant and lighthearted vigor. The revelers are no doubt giddy and full of expectancy as they arrive at the grand party. At about one minute into the movement, a second theme arrives, played by the full string section – though luxurious and soaring, it seems to betray a certain sorrow. This melancholy is ignored quickly enough with the return of the energetic first theme.

The two middle dance movements, the Menuet and the Gavotte, hearken back to an era when they were the epitome of courtly dance and decorum. Yet here they also seem to expose the revelers’ undercurrent of discontent behind their cultured demeanor and fantastic costumes. Although Fauré keeps the structure of these dances formally accurate, the Menuet also contains an unsettling amount of key changes, and dissonant notes begin to enter its harmonic background. At about one minute into the movement, plodding brass and low-pitched timpani begin to darken the atmosphere in the middle Trio section.

A similar psychological discordance infuses the third movement, Gavotte. It begins with a lovely first theme, but it’s cast in a minor key and imbued with dark harmonic hues. Fauré passes that theme around to all the instruments, constructing the passages in such a way as to give an expectation that they’re about to morph into something more structurally complicated, like a fugue – but Fauré never allows it to get there. The effect is slightly unnerving, as if there may be a hidden agenda. The dance continues into a middle section which features a flowing and sweet theme played by the strings, now in a sunnier major key – but musical hints of the first theme continue to appear, thereby finally driving the work to return, and then end with the darker music from the movement’s beginning.

Where one might, instead, have expected a boisterous ending to the party, the Suite ends with an unexpected Pastorale (a
movement typically associated with the serene and lazy mood of the countryside.) Perhaps, the sleepy and drunken revelers are taking a walk under the moonlight – the music is gentle and dreamy, lightly cascading in the strings and harp. The
music grows and sweeps, breathes deeply and deliciously, and all are under the spell of Fauré’s musical charms. But near its end a breathtaking set of harmonies stagger the melodic cadences. They shift around and don’t want to come back to the home key. Although brief, those harmonic shifts cleverly create an atmosphere of surrealism à la Verlaine. Though lush and sated, there is a feeling of being unsure, and alone.