Cantique de Jean Racine, Opus 11 (version for chorus and orchestra)

Composition and premiere: Gabriel Fauré wrote his brief Cantique de Jean Racine for chorus and organ in 1864-65 for a school composition competition, and it was first performed in a version for chorus, organ, and string orchestra on August 4, 1866. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performance: August 7, 2026, Samy Rachid conducting, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed (though BSO Principal Cello Blaise Déjardin’s arrangement for cello ensemble has been played by BSO and Tanglewood Music Center cellos many times during Tanglewood on Parade festivities). Yo-Yo Ma devised the present version, which includes a solo cello role.

Gabriel Fauré lived and worked at an inflection point, with a musical career that bridged the old guard—the solid, sweeping French Romanticism of Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck—and the new—the evocative, daring impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Despite ascending to a place of great influence in French musical society, Fauré engaged sparingly with grander forms like the symphony, preferring the more intimate scale of vocal, piano, and chamber music. He was especially devoted to the art of the French song, setting poetry with meticulous, poignant skill.

At age 9, Fauré became a student at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, a boarding school founded by Louis Niedermeyer and originally named the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse. Although Niedermeyer was a Protestant immigrant from Switzerland, he worked to promote a resurgence of interest in the Catholic church-music heritage of his adopted country. At Niedermeyer’s school the young Fauré trained to become an organist and choirmaster, a career his parents regarded as a respectable and suitable match for his natural talents. The arrival of Saint-Saëns as an instructor at the school broadened Fauré’s horizons by introducing him to contemporary composers including Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. By the time Fauré graduated, he had distinguished himself with an array of prizes. Capping these was the premier prix in composition in 1865 for his Cantique de Jean Racine in its original setting for chorus and organ.

The Cantique sets the Latin hymn “Consors paterni luminis” (“O light of light”), as freely translated by the 17th-century French playwright and poet Jean Racine. Racine’s adaptation, “Verbe égal au Très-Haut” (“Word, one with the Highest”), was not a faithful liturgical copy, but rather a vivid and rapturous entreaty to God and Christ. Fauré acknowledged Racine’s artful contribution—and perhaps the piece’s reflection of earthly sentiments as much as sacred devotion—in his title to the piece. The submission itself was in a spirit of gentle transgression, since the parameters of the competition demanded a more traditional religious text. Regardless, Saint-Saëns and the other competition judges recognized and rewarded the piece’s elegant construction, sensitive setting, and forthright beauty.

Fauré arranged the accompaniment the following year for harmonium and string quintet. Later, he reworked it again for small orchestra without organ. That these arrangements were not published in his lifetime did not impede the enduring popularity of the piece, and composers have continued to create new iterations of the orchestral accompaniment in the modern era. In part due to its brevity, the Cantique is often programmed as a companion piece to Fauré’s Requiem, a beloved piece in the canon. The two works are both intimate approaches to an antique religious form employing an economy of compositional means that elevates the jewel-like simplicity of individual motives and harmonies. The Cantique, however, also stands alone as a self-contained, small-scale masterpiece.

Common to every version of the Cantique is Fauré’s characteristically meticulous restraint, which foregrounds the soaring melodic lines. The expressive theme is introduced by the strings and recurs several times, an anchor that grounds the piece in its essential character of serene devotion. Fauré’s exacting layering of individual voices—each vocal line joins the opening phrase in exquisitely layered counterpoint—is mirrored by the graceful, perfectly proportioned arc of the approximately five-minute piece. In the setting of the passionate middle verse, the voices unite in a sweetly tormented minor key while an obbligato running-triplet figure, formerly a gentle murmuring of the harp, unfurls throughout the strings. After the smoldering fire, if not quite brimstone, of the climax, the cool beauty of the final verse soothes and reaffirms devotion in a cleansing, receding tide.

Zoe Kemmerling

Zoe Kemmerling is a Boston-based lawyer, violist, and writer. She was a Publications Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center.