French musicians had been making pilgrimages to Germany to hear the Wagner operas since the 1860s with the fervor of Grail seekers; thus, it is hardly surprising to find Parisian salons devoted almost wholly to the cult of der Meister later in the century. Of these, the most remarkable must surely have been the "Petit Bayreuth" organized by Judge Antoine Lascoux, at which scenes from the operas were performed by whatever talent was on hand. A contemporary sketch of one of these evenings, published in Le Journal for November 23, 1899, reported that "The orchestra (a chamber one) included several unusual performers: besides d'Indy, Fauré, Messager, Raoul Pugno, and Taffanel, Lascoux played first violin." Paul Taffanel (1844-1908), often called the father of the modern French school of the flute, was a busy man, active at the Opéra de Paris, in the Conservatoire concerts, as the leader of the L'Orchestre de la Société des Instruments à Vent (which commissioned, among many other works, d'Indy's Chansons et danses), and, from 1893, as a professor at the Conservatoire. Fauré was appointed professor of composition there in October 1896, and it was almost inevitable that Taffanel should ask him, in the spring of 1898, to write a sight-reading piece and a concours composition for the July examinations. No doubt owing to Wagnerian camaraderie, Fauré passed the orchestration of his incidental music for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, on which he had been feverishly working, to his pupil Charles Koechlin, so he could get to grips with the concours piece. The Fantaisie for flute and piano occupied him from the beginning of June until at least mid-July, though its fluent brilliance belies the effort that went into it. Opening with a brief sicilienne of great charm, the Fantaisie soon gets down to its raison d'être with a winsomely chirping tune riffled by mercurial pyrotechnics. Writing to Koechlin on his way to London on June 10, 1898, for the June 21 premiere of Pelléas, Fauré complained, "I am drowned in the Taffanel and plunged up to my neck in scales, arpeggios, and staccati! I have already perpetrated 104 bars of this irksome torture...." But for the adept musician who can, as intended, take its virtuoso demands in stride, the Fantaisie affords an airily effusive, scintillantly rapturous, and wholly un-Wagnerian spate of liquid silver. Its first performance was given by the concours winner, one Gaston Blanquart, on July 28, 1898. Despite the grumbling Fauré lavished on the piece, he seems to have prepared an orchestral version, which is now lost. In 1957, Louis Aubert made an orchestral arrangement published by the firm of Hamelle the year after.

© All Music Guide