Après un Rève

His teacher Camille Saint-Saëns exuberantly commented on the music of Gabriel Fauré: “You can find everything in it that can seduce: new forms, bold modulations, curious sounds, a completely unpredictable use of the rhythms; and over all this there is a magic that envelops the whole work and that makes the broad mass of ordinary listeners accept unexpected boldness as the most natural thing in the world.”

This characteristic also applies to Faure’s harp pieces, which are of course too rare. That is why the harpists began to arrange his songs and chamber music with piano for their instrument during his lifetime. Après un rêve is considered Faure’s most popular song, although it is one of his very early ones. In 1878 he set to music an anonymous Italian madrigal poem that describes the awakening after a deep sleep and dreams in love. In the arrangement for cello and harp it becomes a wonderful, small elegy in a melancholic minor color.

Here you can find an arrangement for Solo-Violin and Wind Band by Diana Mols.