Charlotte de Rothschild, Gabriel Fauré: Piano Music

In 1860, Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, publishing under her married name, Baronne Nathaniel de Rothschild, issued four piano pieces with the Parisian firm Maho: a Nocturne and a Polka in C minor, and two Waltzes in A minor and F minor. These works remained largely unnoticed until 2014, when pianist Philip Sears, searching for rare music in the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica collection, found that two of them corresponded to posthumously published works attributed to Frédéric Chopin: the Nocturne in C minor, B. 108, and the Waltz in A minor, B. 150. There are differences in the performance markings, particularly in the Nocturne: the Maho edition offers more pronounced dynamic contrasts than the version published by the Chopin Institute in Warsaw, and gives the tempo as Andante sostenuto rather than Andante.

Maria Luisa Macellaro La Franca, a descendant of Julien Fontana, Chopin’s close associate and an editor of his music, has proposed that Fontana might have attributed these pieces to Chopin in error: they might instead have been composed by the Baroness and subsequently revised or transcribed by her teacher. This is an attribution hypothesis. Charlotte was a painter, amateur pianist, art collector and hostess of cultural salons frequented by figures such as Rossini, Balzac, Delacroix, Heine and Chopin. She studied piano with Chopin from 1841 and was the dedicatee of his Fourth Ballade and the Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64 No. 2. Her musical connections later extended to Bizet and Saint-Saëns.

What might support the suggestion that the Nocturne in C minor and the Waltz in A minor are Charlotte de Rothschild’s compositions? The four pieces published by Maho have a stylistic coherence, including related melodic contours: ascending fourths open the Nocturne, Polka and Waltz. Their harmonic simplicity contrasts with the complexity generally associated with Chopin. Why, moreover, would the Baroness publish Chopin’s music under her own name? Mere narcissism seems an implausible explanation. Similar ornaments and passages in the Polka and Nocturne provide further grounds for comparison. Chopin scholar Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger has also noted differences between the manuscript paper and that typically used by Chopin. The possibility explored here is that the Baroness played these pieces to her teacher, who carefully transcribed them for publication.

Gabriel Fauré’s Nocturnes lead into a more intricate harmonic world. Fauré also had connections with the Rothschild family, dedicating Les myrtes sont flétris to Leonora de Rothschild. A member of the family once advised him that the manner in which he presented himself as a performer could help secure financial success; he gradually set such considerations aside in favour of artistic refinement. Written over approximately forty years, the Nocturnes, from Op. 33 to Op. 119, trace the development of his style. The first set, Op. 33, belongs to his years as an organist and teacher in Paris, writing for intellectually cultivated salons. No. 2 demands virtuosity beyond the reach of an amateur pianist. No. 3 sets an Italianate lyrical melody against adventurous harmonic progressions, balancing immediate appeal with exploration. The charm of the Fourth Nocturne, Op. 36, gives way to a more passionate intensity, recalling Schumann, one of Fauré’s favourite composers.

The Sixth Nocturne, Op. 63, moves towards a more enigmatic idiom, with sudden changes of mood and contrasts between phrases of an archaic character and sparkling figurations. In the later Nocturnes, Fauré abandons salon brilliance altogether. The Eleventh, Op. 104 No. 1, conveys an intimate, almost metaphysical vision, akin to that of the mélodies in Mirages and La chanson d’Ève. Not every listener welcomed this development: Marguerite Long felt that the spareness of Fauré’s later music had cost it some spontaneity. His hearing difficulties compelled him to avoid the extremes of the keyboard, yet he transformed this limitation into an expressive resource. Concentrated in the middle register, this music retains an enigmatic, seemingly prophetic quality.

Album notes by Luca Ciammarughi, © 2017. Original English translation by Alan Richmond; English text revised from the complete booklet notes.

Recording credits

Maria Luisa Macellaro La Franca, piano. Recorded at IndieHub, Milan, in August 2017. Piano: Steinway D-274, serial no. 558456, Fabbrini collection. Sound engineering, editing and mixing: Massimo Marchese. Cover artwork: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Marriage Portrait of Charlotte de Rothschild (1836), The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Production, design and art direction: Osaka Mozart Association. ℗ and © Osaka Mozart Association / Da Vinci Classics. DDD. Made in Japan.