Fauré, Sargent & Paris

Part of TŌN’s Sight & Sound series

In the popular series Sight & Sound, The Orchestra Now explores the parallels between orchestral music and the visual arts. Each performance includes a Met curator introduction, a discussion with conductor and music historian Leon Botstein accompanied by on-screen exhibition images and live musical excerpts, then a full performance of the works and an audience Q&A.

Artist John Singer Sargent was 18 when his family moved to Paris, and within only a few years he was making a name for himself amidst a “painters row” in the Left Bank, becoming one of the best portrait artists in France by age 23. He soon moved to the more cosmopolitan Right Bank, where he painted the infamous “Madame X” and took steady commissions from wealthy patrons. Meanwhile, Gabriel Fauré was hitting a turning point in his career in Paris; several of his works were premiered at the Société nationale de musique, and he eventually became head of the Paris Conservatoire. Both artists successfully melded the end of Romanticism with the dawn of Modernism.