Fauré wrote his Fantaisie in 1898 for the Paris Conservatoire’s annual flute competition. Paul Taffanel, who had taken over the flute class in 1893, commissioned it and is its dedicatee. At the premiere that July, all eight of his students played it, one after another. It comes in two parts: a singing Andantino, then a quick Allegro.
Taffanel matters as much as the piece. The flute was a star in the Baroque (Quantz wrote some three hundred concertos for Frederick the Great), then spent most of the 19th century as a section instrument behind the violin and the piano. The French school brought it back as a solo voice, partly through these commissions. Godard had already written for Taffanel; after Fauré came competition pieces by Chaminade, Enescu and Gaubert, and decades later Dutilleux and Messiaen. Add Debussy’s Faune and Syrinx, and most of what a flutist plays as a soloist was written in French, for a French sound. How lucky we are.
I played through all the good French pieces when I was too young to understand them. It’s a blessing and a light curse. For a long time I thought this was simply what music was supposed to be: layered, harmonically rich, deep. It took me years to realize most music isn’t Fauré, and that this isn’t the rest of music’s fault.
Here’s Emmanuel Pahud, in Louis Aubert’s 1957 orchestration. His playing is very modern. I wish someone would someday dig up a Rampal recording.