I DIDN'T Listen With Mother. I'm not sure why. Possibly because, being born in 1977, five years before the famous radio programme drew to a close, I was just that bit too young. More likely, though, it was because I was listening to Mother. My mum was, and still is, a fantastic pianist and singer.
Aside from an unfortunate incident aged two, when I marched into the front room, took one look at her playing the piano and barked "get back in the kitchen and make the dinner!" (marking me out as an early supporter of the feminist movement), I woul
d listen avidly to what she played and sang. By the time I was five, I was playing and singing myself.
For several generations of British children, though, Listen With Mother, along with the programme's closing music, Gabriel Faure's Berceuse from the Dolly Suite, was an integral part of childhood. But this week, it was a far less well known piece of Faure's music, lost to many more generations, that finally moved into the spotlight.
A previously unknown piano duet by Faure that has only recently been discovered sold at Sotheby's on Wednesday for £20,000. It is believed to have been written around 1870, when Faure was a young, impressionable man just beginning to make his way in the heady atmosphere of 1870s Paris. The piece remains unpublished, although a small excerpt of it can now be heard (and should be listened to, it's delightful) online.
It is incredibly rare these days for such unpublished gems to be found. In an age when the likes of Lily Allen and Sandi Thom have uploaded their music on to MySpace before they've even cleared their throats at the end of a song, over-sharing is de rigueur in the music world.
I'm not sure Faure, one of the giants of late 19th and early 20th-century French music, would have approved. He spent many years in relative obscurity, often destroying works he was unhappy with after only a few performances. He was a rebellious character, a heavy smoker who had fought in the Franco-Prussian war and, at the height of his musical influence, split from France's famous Société Nationale de Musique to form his own breakaway group.
In between all this, he wrote some stunning pieces of music, including the score to the opera Pelleas et Melisande, and his Requiem, seen by many as an elegy for his parents. He even taught the French composer Maurice Ravel, who in turn tutored the British great Ralph Vaughan Williams.
I wonder what Faure would have made of the discovery of this lost score. Would he be proud, or perhaps embarrassed by the excitement over a piece he wrote when he was still relatively young and learning his craft? Would he be quietly pleased that a long forgotten part of his life, hidden for over 100 years, had finally been rediscovered?
Following a serious accident last summer in which I nearly lost my life, I started searching for my own lost score, that fragment of identity which I had somehow left behind in my youth. It led me back to classical music, a world I had discovered in those early years at the piano with my mother, but abandoned in my late teens after years of classical training in order to go to university and, well, the pub.
Last October, while my body and mind were still healing from my accident, I joined a choir and began to sing again properly for the first time in more than 15 years. It has been a wonderful experience, both confidence-building and heart-lifting, and a reminder that not everything we leave behind in our childhood should be kept there permanently.
As Faure would no doubt agree, it's amazing just how far listening with Mother can take you.
The full article contains 655 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
