Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Fauré's musical output. Today, a failed collaboration; a professorship; and Fauré makes his mark in London.

A 25,000-franc commission to create a music drama for the inauguration of a wealthy heiress's magnificent new music room, with one of the century's most celebrated poets as your librettist - what could possibly go wrong? In the event, the project barely got off the starting-blocks. Despite the good offices of the Princesse de Polignac - a.k.a. Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune - Fauré couldn't even agree on a subject with the eminent but ailing Paul Verlaine. So no collaboration, but Fauré did go on to set some of Verlaine's poetry to music - his song-cycle La bonne chanson, which charts the course of a perfect, immutable love, being a marvellous example. Love of the doomed, catastrophic kind was the subject-matter of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, and it drew from Fauré some of his most touching music, commissioned for a London production in 1898.

Sérénade du Bourgeois Gentilhomme ('Je languis nuit et jour')
Gérard Souzay, baritone
Dalton Baldwin, piano

La bonne chanson, Op 61
Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Ensemble Contraste

Fantaisie for flute and piano, Op 79
Michel Debost, flute
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano

Pélleas et Mélisande - Suite, Op 80
Jill Gomez, soprano
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
David Zinman, conductor

Producer: Chris Barstow. Show less