Composed 1880; 7 minutes

After successfully completing two chamber works—the First Violin Sonata and Piano Quartet—Fauré turned his thoughts to a cello sonata, starting, as was his custom, with the slow movement. The resulting Élégie was first played privately. “My cello piece was very well received’, Fauré wrote to his publisher, “and that greatly encourages me to go on and finish the whole sonata.” Three years later, however, the elegantly somber, at first inward-looking, later impassioned Élégie was published as a separate piece and it was to be almost four decades before Fauré composed the first of his two cello sonatas. He subsequently orchestrated the Élégie in 1895. Its deeply sorrowful theme became the basis for an extended improvisation by the organist at Fauré’s state funeral in 1924.