Of Fauré's major works, La Naissance de Vénus is the least known among his most immediately ingratiating, but the last to be discovered by performers and audiences. Fauré valued it highly, performed it often, and found it sufficiently representative of his art to offer it with a chorus 400 strong at the prestigious Leeds Festival on October 8, 1898, and as late as April 2, 1913, at a festival of French music presented at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Commissioned by, and dedicated to, Antonin Guillot de Sainbris for the Société chorale d'amateurs, La Naissance de Vénus was composed hurriedly in 1882 and given its premiere—with piano accompaniment (supplied by Fauré, César Franck, and one M. Maton)—by the Société chorale on March 8, 1883. The Société's previous commission had been Franck's cantata Rebecca. A second performance took place under the auspices of the Société nationale de Musique on April 3, 1886. Though Hamelle published Fauré's vocal score in 1883, the composer did not orchestrate the work until 1895—the orchestral version's premiere took place at a Colonne concert on December 1, 1895. In 1889, the American painter John Singer Sargent did the famous oil portrait of Fauré—followed in the 1890s by two charcoal drawings of him and a pencil sketch, all today widely reproduced—and introduced the composer to an influential, arts-mad English society contingent, including nobles, bankers, and wealthy businessmen who hosted him frequently and greeted his works—often with Fauré at the piano for performances of his songs and chamber works—for the remainder of his life. Among his most devoted devotees was attorney Frederick Brunning Maddison, whose publishing firm Metzler and Co. began to print and distribute Fauré's latest works, and those of his own wife, Adela. Private performances of La Naissance de Vénus were given at the Maddisons' home on Hyde Park Corner in late March and early April 1898, and Adela translated Paul Collin's lame text (of the genre of those frigid Prix de Rome cantata texts Berlioz satirized in his Memoirs) into English for the Leeds performance. What the verse lacks, Fauré's music supplies: a sensuously ravishing introduction, chorus of Nereids, and an orchestral interlude tremble on the brink of the marvelous heralding Venus as she rises from the ocean foam, called forth by Jupiter in a nobly serene aria and celebrated in a more conventional but suavely effective choral apostrophe. By 1899, Adela Maddison had abandoned her husband and two children to live in Paris as Fauré's mistress.

© All Music Guide