Composed 1921; 8 minutes

Like Chopin, Fauré placed the piano at the center of his work. All but one of his chamber pieces (the String Quartet) include the instrument. Both composers avoided descriptive titles, favoring abstract ones. Fauré’s sets of 13 Barcarolles and 13 Nocturnes lead collections that also include Impromptus, Préludes, and Valses-caprices. These works span more than forty years, ending with the B minor Nocturne, Op. 119, completed on the evening of December 31, 1921. This piece carries the weight of farewell, with its austere B minor tonality and somber, chorale-like four-part writing—which Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux likens to “the most astonishing of Bach’s chorale preludes.” Fauré’s mentor and lifelong friend Camille Saint-Saëns had just died, and the composer—now profoundly deaf—distills both mortality and life itself into his final nocturne. The opening theme is hushed and meditative, shaped by a falling, lamenting interval and contour, which reappears in the theme of the impassioned, virtuosic central Allegro. In his last piece for solo piano, Fauré achieves a profound equilibrium born of wisdom.