The Cello Sonata No. 2 occupied Fauré from February to November 1921, as the composer passed his seventy-fifth birthday plagued by deafness, illness, and the infirmities of age. The work's restlessly percolating first movement opens with a long, agitated melody, which the second theme, elegiac but hustled by relentless élan, cannot placate. The brisk canonic interplay between the two suggests passionate regret whose upshot, in the final bars, is a wan smile, more a memory than acceptance. The central Andante, curiously, is a literal transcription of the Chant funéraire (1921) for military band, which Fauré had earlier written on commission from the state to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Napoleon's death. (Fauré originally wrote the music on three staves; the work was arranged for band by the leader of the Garde républicaine, Guillaume Belay.) In both settings, it is a somber, nobly imposing statement, a mourning processional that temporarily halts for a moment of tender elegy, rising to an animated crescendo before the slow, inexorable, tread begins once more. The surprise of the B flat major Allegro vivo is that the agitation of the first movement is here transformed in fantastic, continually modulating scintillations into a wry but genuine grin. Following its premiere by cellist André Hekking and pianist Alfred Cortot at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on May 13, 1922, Vincent d'Indy was moved to write to Fauré: "I want to tell you that I'm still under the spell of your beautiful Cello Sonata.... The Andante is a masterpiece of sensitivity and expression, and I love the finale, so perky and delightful.... How lucky you are to stay young like that!"

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