
By 1861 he had been a pupil for seven years at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris which set out primarily to train church musicians.
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Therefore recording is an ideal medium for it, free of all the material distractions of dress, gesture or facial exercise.įauré’s preference for suggestion and nuance may seem to sit uneasily with his choice of Victor Hugo as the poet for his six earliest songs (one thinks of André Gide’s famous reply to question of who was France’s greatest poet: ‘Victor Hugo, hélas !’), but the composer, even at the age of sixteen, was careful over what he set. In this respect, if in no other, his music resembles that of Erik Satie: it tends to speaks to each of us singly in familiar tones. Where Duparc embraces the grand gesture, Fauré for the most part prefers the suggestion, the nuance. Henri Duparc was a close friend, but his songs, dubbed by Fauré’s pupil Ravel ‘imperfect but works of genius’, had only a passing impact on Fauré’s own. But many elements remained unchanged: among them, a distaste for pretentious pianism (‘Oh pianists, pianists, pianists, when will you consent to hold back your implacable virtuosity !!!!’ he wrote, to a pianist, in 1919) and a loving care for prosody-not infrequently he ‘improved’ on the poet for musical reasons. (5) What they do reveal about Lans 380, however, is that since they alternate regularly throughout the manuscript, the manuscript was essentially.In sixty years of songwriting, between 18, Fauré’s craft understandably developed in richness and subtlety. Although these watermarks occur quite commonly throughout Europe during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it has not been possible to establish a corresponding match for either of them in the main sources for identifying watermarks of the Middle Ages. There are two main watermarks to be found throughout Lans 380: a bull's head with surmounting "X," and a forked, barred, Gothic letter "P" crowned by a fleuron. (3) It will be useful to give his brief comments in full: The manuscript Lansdowne 380 is a small, paper volume, written in France by several hands during the second half of the fifteenth century it was already in England in the first half of the sixteenth century, since there is written, on the first flyleaf, in a handwriting of that time: 'by the leysurles hand de nouster pover serviteur Thomas Kendall.' (4)Īs will be seen, there are problems with Champion's assessment, although it is probably true that the manuscript was written during the second half of the fifteenth century.Ī single bifolium serves as protective flyleaves at the beginning of the volume following this, there is a succession of thirty-four fascicles of lengths varying from six through ten leaves in the resulting collation:, , 3-:, 6-:, 9-:, ,, , 15-: 17-: 19-:, ,, ,,. One of the most extended discussions of Lans 380 in the secondary literature is a brief description of the manuscript by Pierre Champion in 1913, as part of a larger discussion of the influence that the poetry of Charles d'Orleans had on the creation of song poetry during the fifteenth century. (2) That inventory is really only a listing of the longest items occurring in the manuscript, however, and in many cases simply reiterates the rubric given for an item, which is not always enlightening. (1) Very little else, however, is actually known about the manuscript, since no study of it has ever appeared in print, and the only inventory of its contents appears in the British Library catalog of its holdings of the Lansdowne collection. Scholars interested in the poetry of Charles, duc d' Orleans (1394-1465), have long known of the manuscript, and it has also been of interest to musicologists studying the secular French chanson of the fifteenth century, since in 1929 Norbert Hardy Wallis published an edition of a selection of its sixty song texts. It is of unknown provenance and date, although it is generally assumed to have been written somewhere in France during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.

It was re-bound in 1970, so the original binding, which might have given some clue to the manuscript's provenance, is now lost. The British Library manuscript Lansdowne 380 (hereinafter Lans 380) is a quarto volume comprised of 280 paper folios, measuring 210 cm x 145 cm.
