MéLODIE
Just as Claude Monet was the principal model for the fictional artist Elstir in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, so Gabriel Fauré seems to have been the principal model for Vinteuil, the composer character in the same panoramic novel. The late-blooming Fauré, a pupil of Saint-Saëns both in composition and in organ, was never even slightly involved in countercultural or bohemian activities—from 1896 he was professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory, from 1905 to 1920 its director—but his many settings of “decadent” and Symbolist poetry helped establish a genre of subtly understated art song that the French call mélodie. (The actual use of the word seems to originate with Berlioz, who in 1830 published nine settings from the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore under the title “Neuf mélodies,” and reused the term a dozen years later in a group of six songs to texts by the Romantic poet Théophile Gautier composed in 1840–41, later orchestrated in 1856 as a cycle entitled Les nuits d’été or “Summer Nights.”)
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 2 Getting Rid of Glue." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-div1-002006.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 2 Getting Rid of Glue. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-div1-002006.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 2 Getting Rid of Glue." In Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-div1-002006.xml
