Consors paterni luminis

Programme

About 45 minutes of music, without an interval. Applause comes at the end.

Performers and forces

Cristina Avilés, soprano, and Esteban Serrano, bass, soloists. Mixed choir and orchestra. The two works call for different forces. The Cantique, in the orchestral version: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, harp and strings. The Requiem, in the symphonic version: two flutes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp, organ and strings, with solo violin in the Sanctus.

The detail that stands out is that the Requiem has no oboes and the Cantique does: the orchestra’s two oboes play the first work and are silent for the rest of the evening. In the Requiem, Fauré keeps the weight of the sound in the middle of the strings, with divided violas and cellos and the organ underneath; over that ground enters the violin section, which the Madeleine version did not have: there, only the solo violin of the Sanctus, added in 1893, was heard. The horns can already be heard in the Hosanna of the Sanctus, and the brass sounds with its full weight in the Libera me.

Conductor’s note

Tonight’s title is the first line of a Latin hymn for Matins: Consors paterni luminis, ‘sharer in the Father’s light’. Jean Racine paraphrased it in French verse, and on those verses Fauré wrote his Cantique, while still a pupil at the school Louis Niedermeyer had founded in Paris to train church musicians. It is the work with which we begin.

We chose that line because it describes what is going to happen in the next hour. The evening begins with an invocation to light and ends with the angels carrying a soul into paradise. Between the one and the other, what is missing is what stood at the centre of the great nineteenth-century requiems: the judgement.

Fauré’s Requiem has no Dies irae. The sequence of the day of wrath, with its trumpet and its tribunal, is not there. Of the sequence he keeps only its last two lines, which he turns into the Pie Jesu; the dies illa, dies irae heard in the Libera me belongs to that responsory and not to the sequence. In its place Fauré puts a Pie Jesu for a single voice, the simplest prayer he ever wrote, and closes with the In Paradisum, which belongs to the burial rite and is sung as the body leaves the church.

Fauré was reproached because his Requiem did not express the fear of death, and someone called it ‘a lullaby of death’. He replied that this was how he felt death: ‘as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience’. He said so in a conversation in 1902.

Both works are heard with orchestra. The Cantique, in its orchestral version, which is the last it received. The Requiem, in the symphonic version: the one first heard in Lille in April 1900, performed that summer at the Trocadéro in Paris and published by Hamelle the following year. It is the form in which the Requiem left the liturgy of the Madeleine and entered the concert hall, with violins and woodwind that the parish ensemble did not have. The manuscript of neither orchestration survives, and the critical study in this programme sets out what is known and what is not.

And there is the date. We sing on the eve of All Saints. The In Paradisum asks that the angels lead the departed, that the martyrs receive them on their arrival and that the choir of angels welcome them. Tomorrow the Church celebrates those martyrs and all the saints. We ask you not to applaud between the numbers of the Requiem.

The works

Sung texts

The text is printed as it is sung, which in the Requiem does not entirely match that of the Mass for the Dead: Fauré removes some passages and keeps others that are not from the Mass. The differences are explained in the critical study. English translations made for this version from the original texts, following the Spanish translations by Clemente Mata Ruiz.

Layer 3 · Critical study

Academic layer. The statements rest on primary sources, critical editions and published studies, cited in notes (print version) and in the final bibliography. Where the documentation falls short, the text says so.

I. Sources, versions and editions

Both works in this programme have come down to us in several versions, and the choice between them determines what is heard. The case of the Requiem is the more complex: its author kept enlarging it between 1887 and 1893 for the choir of the Madeleine, and it was then published, in 1900, in a symphonic orchestration whose authorship is not documented. That is the score performed tonight, and so here the problem ceases to be a scholarly one and comes to affect what will actually sound.

Cantique de Jean Racine: three forms

Nectoux’s preface to his critical edition distinguishes three forms: choir and organ (1865); choir, harmonium and string quintet, in which it was first performed in Rennes on 4 August 1866; and choir and orchestra, first performed on 28 January 1906 at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire, conducted by Georges Marty. To the second form there also corresponds a Paris performance on 15 May 1875 at the Société nationale de musique, conducted by César Franck, to whom the work is dedicated. The catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France records the first two and the third as separate works. There is no autograph of the orchestral version, and its attribution to Fauré is reasonable but undocumented.

The scoring of that orchestral version, according to the Carus edition, is mixed choir, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, harp and strings. It has no organ, unlike the two earlier forms, and it does have oboes, unlike the symphonic Requiem heard afterwards. It is the version performed tonight.

The manuscripts of both orchestrations heard tonight are missing, but the cases are not equivalent and should not be treated alike. In the Cantique, Nectoux considers it reasonable to suppose that Fauré made it himself. In the Requiem, by contrast, he cautiously points to another hand, that of Roger-Ducasse. What both share is the status of the text: we perform scores circulated under Fauré’s name whose instrumental workmanship cannot be verified from documents. The voices, the harmony and the form are his.

The Requiem: chronology of the manuscripts

The dates of the manuscripts come from the chronology established by Nectoux; the record of the work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France documents the versions and editions. The work thus had three states: the five numbers of January 1888; the seven numbers of the 1893 version, with the Offertoire and the Libera me and with added horns and trumpets; and the symphonic version of 1900, which is the one performed here.

The catalogue of Fauré’s works established by Nectoux lists the two forms under the same number, with a version suffix: N 97a, version d'église, and N 97b, version de concert. It therefore treats them as two versions of one work, even though the difference in scoring between them is considerable.

The 1900 version and the problem of its authorship

The symphonic version was first heard in Lille on 6 April 1900, and on 12 July that year it was performed at the Trocadéro in Paris, as part of the Universal Exhibition, with much larger choral and orchestral forces; it is this second performance that is usually cited as the premiere, and the two should not be confused. It was published by Julien Hamelle: the vocal score in 1900, prepared by Jean Roger-Ducasse, and the full score in 1901. Nectoux has cautiously proposed Roger-Ducasse as the possible author of the reorchestration, and warns that the manuscript survives neither in the publisher’s archive nor in the composer’s. It is a hypothesis, not a proven fact, and whoever performs this score should know that they are playing a text whose material genesis is unknown. What can be verified is what it does: it adds violins, flutes and clarinets, strengthens the brass and extends to the whole work an orchestral writing that in 1893 was concentrated in the middle of the strings.

It is worth stating what does not change. The voices, the harmony, the form and the tempi are the same. The debate concerns the orchestration, not the musical text the choir sings. Fauré authorised the publication and never disowned this form of the work, which circulated in his lifetime and under his name. That much can be asserted: there is no record that he conducted the 1900 performances, and no proof of his hand in the orchestration survives.

The editions

The two modern editions restored to the repertoire the chamber version, which for almost a century had not been available. Nectoux and Delage’s edition also reconstructs the vocal forces of the Madeleine, with boys’ voices in the upper parts and a treble in the Pie Jesu. This concert does not use them: it performs the 1900 version with mixed choir and solo soprano, which is the possible solution when no boys’ choir is available.

Why this version

The main reason is one of purpose. The 1893 version is music for worship: it is written to accompany a funeral in a particular parish, with the musicians who were in that gallery. The 1900 version is the form in which the work ceased to be an office and became concert repertoire, which is exactly what happens tonight at the Compañía. Performing it this way corresponds to the kind of event we are holding.

To this is added a practical reason: the Cathedral’s permanent ensemble is an orchestra, and this score is written for one. And an acoustic consequence that has to be worked on. The vaults of the nave prolong the sound and blend it, so the orchestral reinforcement can cover the inner voices of the choir, which is where Fauré places the harmonic substance. The balance is achieved by reducing the upper strings in the homophonic numbers and keeping the full weight for the Libera me.

In gaining the violins and woodwind, the dark, unshining colour of the Madeleine version is lost, which is what anyone who knows the recordings of the chamber version misses first. The loss is real, and it is stated here.

II. Context: a school, a parish and a century

The École Niedermeyer

Fauré entered the school Louis Niedermeyer had founded to train church musicians in 1854, at the age of nine. The curriculum included plainchant, modality, early polyphony and organ. Niedermeyer and d'Ortigue’s treatise on plainchant accompaniment sums up its doctrine: to harmonise Gregorian chant respecting the modes, without forcing it into major and minor tonality. Katharine Ellis has studied how that recovery of the musical past formed part of a wider movement in nineteenth-century France. In Fauré it left a lasting mark, above all in the treatment of cadences and in the modal turns within a tonal language.

The Madeleine

Fauré was choirmaster at the Madeleine from 1877 and principal organist from 1896. The Requiem was born of that post: a wealthy Paris parish, with frequent funerals and a permanent ensemble of singers and instrumentalists. The scoring of the 1893 version describes what was in that gallery. It is important to understand exactly what the omission of the Dies irae consists of: the work is not a complete cycle of the Mass for the Dead, because it also leaves out the gradual, the tract and the communion, and it adds two pieces that do not belong to the Mass. What Fauré wrote are the polyphonic numbers of a funeral whose remainder was sung in plainchant. The symphonic version heard tonight keeps those decisions and changes the sound frame.

The century of the Dies irae

To measure what Fauré does, one has to look at the others. Berlioz’s Requiem (1837) and Verdi’s (1874) make the sequence the dramatic centre of the work, with large choral and orchestral forces. The Last Judgement was the subject, and terror the means. Against them, Fauré’s does without the tribunal. One should not be hasty in interpreting that renunciation. Fauré was not writing a complete Mass for the Dead: his work sets seven numbers and leaves the rest of the office in plainchant, so the absence of the sequence is, in the first place, a matter of division between polyphony and plainchant. That he also chose to do without it, with the model of Berlioz and Verdi before him, is what calls for an explanation, and Caballero has studied in detail what can and cannot be deduced from this work about its author’s convictions.

Fauré’s faith

Fauré’s personal religious position has been much debated, and Carlo Caballero devotes a whole chapter of his study of the composer’s aesthetics to it. What can be verified is that he devoted a good part of his professional life to church music, knew the liturgy from the inside and chose carefully which texts he set to music. In 1902 he described death as ‘a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above’. The phrase is late, fourteen years after the work, and should be handled as what it is: a statement by the mature composer about the way he felt death, not an explanation of what he wrote in 1888.

III. Formal analysis and questions of performance

The analysis that follows describes the formal and tonal organisation of the works on the basis of the critical edition and the bibliography cited. Bar numbers, when needed for rehearsal work, should be taken from the edition the choir uses.

Cantique de Jean Racine

The work is in D flat major. An instrumental introduction presents the materials that will sustain it to the end: a calm melody in the middle register, a slow-moving bass and a continuous inner figuration, given in the orchestral version to the strings and harp, which creates a sense of movement even when the voices pause. The voices enter one by one, from the lowest to the highest, and then group into homophonic blocks. Racine’s text, in three stanzas, is distributed across two large sections separated by a short interlude, and the last stanza returns to the material of the opening. The choral writing already foreshadows that of the Requiem: homophony with one prominent voice predominates, and counterpoint, when it appears, is limited to short imitative entries like those at the beginning.

Requiem: tonal architecture

The work begins in D minor and ends in D major. The change of mode takes place on the same tonic, with no dramatic modulation in between. The Pie Jesu occupies the exact centre, the fourth of seven numbers, and is the only one for solo voice. Byron Adams has analysed how the work organises its course around the image of light, from the lux perpetua of the opening to the lux aeterna of the fifth number.

The absent Dies irae

Without the sequence, the work loses the block that in Berlioz or Verdi organises the whole architecture. Fauré compensates through symmetry: two choral numbers at the extremes, the Pie Jesu on the axis and the Libera me as the only moment of tension before the end. The words dies illa, dies irae heard in the Libera me belong to the text of that responsory, which shares them with the sequence without deriving from it.

To say that the sequence is missing altogether would be inaccurate. The two lines of the Pie Jesu are those that close the Dies irae: Pie Iesu Domine, dona eis requiem. Fauré does without almost the whole sequence and keeps the plea with which it ends, the phrase that closes it. That phrase is what he places at the centre of the work and entrusts to a single voice. The suppression, then, consists in choosing which part of the sequence matters.

The text as sung

A comparison with the Mass for the Dead reveals two further differences. In the offertory, sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam is missing, so the archangel who, as standard-bearer, leads the souls into the holy light disappears, and the text moves from the plea for deliverance to the offering of the hostias et preces. And in the Sanctus the Benedictus is not sung, so the number ends on the Hosanna and does not open out again. The three omissions point in the same direction: they remove the tribunal, the companion who leads the departed to the light and the acclamation of welcome, and leave standing the plea for rest.

In Paradisum

The seventh number belongs to the burial rite, not to the Mass, and was sung as the body left the church. Including it changes the end of the work, which closes with the procession out. Fauré writes it as a sustained line for the choir, with the sopranos in the foreground, over an undulating accompaniment that never stops throughout the number.

Performance decisions

The Iglesia de la Compañía has a Latin-cross plan and a single nave, covered with sail vaults separated by transverse arches; over the crossing rises a coffered dome with a lantern, and the transept arms and the main chapel have barrel vaults. Those surfaces prolong the sound and favour blending, but can reduce the clarity of the inner voices. With a symphony orchestra in front, the risk multiplies: the reinforcement of violins and woodwind added by the 1900 version falls precisely on the register in which the choir’s inner voices sing. It is advisable to balance towards those voices, moderate the upper strings in the homophonic numbers and articulate final consonants with more care. This is adjusted at the dress rehearsal.

IV. Theological reading

The programme joins two texts separated by twenty-two years and united by one subject, light. The first asks for it in the night vigil and the second promises it at the end of the road; between the two, Fauré leaves out the judgement.

Consors paterni luminis: the light of the Son

The hymn belongs to Matins, the hour prayed before dawn. Its first line is a Christological formula: it calls the Son a sharer in the Father’s light, in the line of John’s prologue and of the lumen de lumine of the Nicene Creed. The Trinitarian affirmation comes at the end, in the doxology. The text has three moments: the invocation of the Word as hope and as eternal day, the plea that the fire of grace awaken the sleeping soul, and the final offering, in which the gathered people present their songs. In that third moment it is the assembled congregation that speaks, asking and offering as one body, and what it offers is the song itself.

A requiem without judgement

The sequence Dies irae, attributed to Thomas of Celano, puts into verse the medieval eschatology of the Last Judgement: the trumpet that summons the graves, the throne, the book and the separation of the just and the damned. By leaving it out, Fauré shifts the emphasis from appearing before the judge to being welcomed. The words most often repeated are words of rest and welcome: requiem, lux, dona eis, suscipiat. The judgement does not disappear entirely. The Libera me asks to be delivered from eternal death on the dreadful day, and its own text names the dies illa, dies irae. But that day is no longer the centre of the work.

The Pie Jesu at the centre

That the Pie Jesu is the end of the sequence has a theological consequence that goes beyond the cut. In the liturgy, those two lines come at the end of the whole sequence, when the text has already described the entire judgement, and they are an intercession in the third person: it is not the departed who speaks, but the one who prays for them. Fauré takes them out of there and places them at the centre, with nothing before them. The plea no longer comes after the fear; it becomes the starting point. It is voiced, moreover, by a single voice, which at the Madeleine was that of a boy, and the choir is silent while it lasts.

In Paradisum and the communion of saints

The final antiphon asks that the angels lead the departed, that the martyrs receive them and that the choir of angels welcome them. It is a text about the communion of saints: no one arrives alone; there is an assembly waiting. That is why the date of this concert matters. We sing on the eve of All Saints, and the antiphon names the martyrs whom the Church celebrates the next day, together with all the saints. The solemnity of 1 November is not the feast of the angels, who have theirs on 29 September and 2 October; what it celebrates is the assembly of those who have already arrived, which is exactly the one the text sets waiting for the departed.

What is gained by taking away

The three suppressions in the text, the sequence, the archangel of the offertory and the Benedictus, could be read as an impoverishment. Seen together they have another effect. What remains after them is a plea addressed to Christ and a welcome the text makes conditional on nothing. The departed in this work is not made to appear before a tribunal; they are received by an assembly that awaits them. There lies the difference from the dramatic model of the nineteenth century, and it lies in the choice of words before it lies in the music.

Beauty and light

Hans Urs von Balthasar understood beauty as the form in which the divine becomes perceptible. Tonight’s programme goes from light asked for to light promised. Consors paterni luminis asks that the Father’s light awaken the sleeping soul; the In Paradisum asks that this soul be received into eternal light. The evening begins in D flat major and ends in D major, and at its centre is a single voice asking rest for the departed.

Accessibility

What will happen

The concert lasts about 45 minutes, without an interval. The lights in the nave stay on at half strength. There are no sound effects or sudden changes of lighting.

First a short piece is sung, about five minutes long, in French. Then a work of about 38 minutes in Latin, divided into seven parts.

The music is calm almost all the time. There are two loud moments. One, brief, in the third part, the Sanctus, when the horns come in. The other, longer, in the sixth part, the Libera me, which begins with a single low voice and then brings in the whole choir, with the brass and timpani. In the fourth part, the Pie Jesu, a single person sings with very little accompaniment: it is the quietest moment.

There is a reserved low-stimulation area; the front-of-house staff can take you there and show you the nearest exit. Applause comes at the end. You may leave at any time.

The concert in easy read

Audio description of the space

Text of the audio track, for those who prefer to read it.

Accessibility statement

This programme has been prepared following the WCAG 2.2 guidelines, level AA, and the standard EN 301 549.

This concert offers: accessible navigation with screen reader and keyboard, audio description of the space, an easy-read version, sung texts with translation in high contrast and enlargeable type, an anticipation guide and a low-stimulation area.

The programme will grow from concert to concert, and each new feature will be announced when it is available and tested.

Sources and bibliography

Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, notes and bibliography system. Primary sources, musical editions, scholarly reference works, official publications and published studies are cited. On one specific point, the first performance of the symphonic version, the documentation available for this programme comes from recording and programme notes; the corresponding note says so.