Nocturne No. 1 in E‑Flat Major

Intimate, sophisticated, elegant, the first of Fauré’s landmark series of nocturnes for piano is very much what you’d expect of music written to be heard in 19th-century Parisian salons—indebted to the example of Chopin, not only in its title but in the stylistic balance of Classical and Romantic that lend it a certain aristocratic poise. It’s an early work, dating from 1875, when the composer was just turning 30 and establishing himself in that same salon world: the guest of glittering hostesses like the singer Pauline Viardot. But as ever with Fauré, formal niceties contain a passionate intensity which breaks though here on terms that signal what would later become compositional fingerprints. Beginning with a pensively slow, Chopinesque tread, the music gets turbulent with undulating rhythms and sharply syncopated accompaniments to a sustained melodic line—until the pensive mood returns. Nothing is heart-on-sleeve—Fauré abhorred cheap sentiment—and there’s no personal programme to the piece. But it’s perhaps of interest that, in 1875, he wasn’t just a guest at Viardot’s salons; he was also in love with one of her daughters. About Fauré's Nocturnes Fauré’s reputation as a composer for solo piano rests largely on the 13 Nocturnes that he composed over a span of almost half a century from 1875 to 1921: effectively the span of his creative life. Subtle and complex, with a salon intimacy, they are works of cultivated beauty that suggest a kind of pianist’s pianism: no extravagant, crowd-pleasing gestures. But their understatement and restraint contains a stifled passion, often darkly powerful. They tend to start and finish in comparative serenity but with an intervening turbulence. And though apparently unvirtuosic, they are seriously challenging to play.