Gabriel Fauré and Théodore Reinach

Abstract

This chapter focuses on archaeologist and music scholar Théodore Reinach’s collaboration with composer Gabriel Fauré. In 1894 Reinach asked the composer to create an instrumental accompaniment to a recently discovered second-century BCE hymn dedicated to Apollo in Delphi. Reinach, along with other scholars from the French school of Athens, deciphered the Greek notation from the marble tablets, and Fauré wrote a modern accompaniment to the original melody. For Reinach, the need to re-enact antiquity transcended scholarly interest in his personal life. Reinach not only reconstructed ancient Greek music, but also built a replica ancient Greek villa in the south of France (with a modern piano hidden behind an ancient cabinet) in order to live out his ancient Greek fantasies. This chapter uses the metaphor of the modern piano hidden behind the ancient veneer of the cabinet to explore the ways modern aesthetics lurk underneath the scientific reconstructions of ancient music carried out by Reinach in the 1890s and 1910s.