Gabriel Fauré
Encyclopedia
Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers. Among his best-known works are his Nocturnes for piano, the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune"
, and his Pavane
and Requiem
.
Born into a cultured but not unusually musical family, Fauré revealed his talent when he was a small boy. He was sent to a music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns
, who became a lifelong friend. In his early years, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine
and head of the Paris Conservatoire
, he still lacked time for composing, retreating to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition.
By his last years, Fauré was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922 headed by the President of the Republic. Fauré had many admirers in England, but his music, though known in other countries, took decades more to become widely accepted. His music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism
with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of his death the atonal
music of the Second Viennese School
was being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations affected the teaching of harmony for later generations. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his last works, written when increasing deafness had struck him, are elusive and withdrawn in character.
, Ariège, Midi-Pyrénées, on 12 May 1845, the fifth son and sixth child of Toussaint-Honoré Fauré (1810–85) and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade (1809–87). He was sent to live with a wet nurse
until he was four years old. In 1849 Toussaint-Honoré was appointed director of the École Normale at Montgauzy, near Foix
, and Fauré returned to live with his family. There was a chapel attached to the school, and the young Fauré spent hours playing the harmonium
there. An old blind woman, who came to listen and give the boy advice, told his father of Fauré's gift for music. In 1853 an official of the National Assembly of France, Dufaur de Saubiac, heard Fauré and advised his father to send him to the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse (School of Classical and Religious Music), which Louis Niedermeyer
was setting up in Paris. After reflecting for a year, Fauré's father agreed and took the 9-year-old boy to Paris in October 1854.
Fauré remained a boarder at the school for 11 years, during which he was helped by a scholarship from the bishop of his home diocese. The régime at the school was austere, the rooms were gloomy, the food was mediocre, and the boys were required to wear an elaborate uniform. The musical tuition, however, was excellent. Under Niedermeyer, the curriculum concentrated on church music, with the aim of producing qualified organists and choirmasters. Fauré's tutors were Clément Loret for the organ, Louis Dietsch for harmony, Xavier Wackenthaler for counterpoint
and fugue
, and Niedermeyer for the piano, plainsong
and composition.
In March 1861 Niedermeyer died. Camille Saint-Saëns
, who took his place in charge of piano studies, introduced his students to contemporary music, including that of Schumann
, Liszt
and Wagner
. He took great pleasure in the progress of the gifted young Fauré. The two became close friends and remained so until Saint-Saëns died sixty years later. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including premiers prix in composition for the Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11, the earliest of his choral works to enter the regular repertory. He left the school in July 1865, as a Laureat in organ, piano, harmony and composition, with a Maître de Chapelle diploma.
in Brittany. During his four years there he supplemented his income by taking private pupils, giving "countless piano lessons". He was bored at Rennes and had an uneasy relationship with the parish priest, who rightly doubted Fauré's religious conviction. Fauré was regularly seen stealing out during the sermon for a cigarette, and in early 1870, when he turned up to play at Mass
one Sunday still in his evening clothes having been out all night at a ball, he was asked to resign. Almost immediately he secured the post of assistant organist at the church of Notre-Dame de Clignancourt, in the north of Paris. He remained there for only a few months; on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War
in 1870, he volunteered for military service. He took part in the action to raise the Siege of Paris
and saw action at Le Bourget
, Champigny
and Créteil
.
After France's defeat by Prussia
, there was a brief, bloody conflict within Paris, during the Commune
. Fauré escaped to Rambouillet
where one of his brothers lived, and then travelled to Switzerland, where he took up a teaching post at the École Niedermeyer, which had temporarily relocated there to avoid the violence in Paris. His first pupil at the school was André Messager
, who became a lifelong friend and occasional collaborator. When Fauré returned to Paris in October 1871, he was appointed choirmaster at the Église Saint-Sulpice under the composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor
. He regularly attended Saint-Saëns's musical salon
gatherings and those of Pauline Viardot, to whom Saint-Saëns introduced him. He was an early member of the Société Nationale de Musique
, formed in February 1871 under the joint chairmanship of Romain Bussine
and Saint-Saëns, to promote new French music. Other members included Georges Bizet
, Emmanuel Chabrier
, Henri Duparc, Vincent d'Indy
, César Franck
, Édouard Lalo
and Jules Massenet
. Fauré became secretary of the society in 1874. Many of his works were first presented at the society's concerts.
In 1874, Fauré moved from Saint-Sulpice to the Église de la Madeleine
, deputising for the principal organist, Saint-Saëns, during the latter's many absences on tour. Some admirers of Fauré's music have expressed regret that although he played the organ professionally for four decades, he left no solo compositions for the instrument. Saint-Saëns said of Fauré that he was "a first class organist when he wanted to be", and he was renowned for his improvisations. Nevertheless, he preferred the piano to the organ, which he played only because it gave him a regular income.
1877 was a significant year for Fauré, both professionally and personally. In January his violin sonata
was performed at a Société Nationale concert with great success, marking a turning-point in his composing career. In March, Saint-Saëns retired from the Madeleine, succeeded as organist by Théodore Dubois
, his choirmaster, to which subordinate post Fauré was now appointed. In July Fauré became engaged to Pauline Viardot's daughter Marianne, with whom he was deeply in love. To his great sorrow, she broke off the engagement in November 1877, for reasons that are not clear. To distract Fauré, Saint-Saëns took him to Weimar
and introduced him to Franz Liszt
. This visit gave Fauré a liking for foreign travel, which he pursued for the rest of his life. From 1878, he and Messager made trips abroad to see Wagner operas. They saw Das Rheingold
and Die Walküre
at Cologne Opera
; the complete Ring
cycle at the Hofoper
in Munich and at Her Majesty's Theatre
in London; and Die Meistersinger
in Munich and at Bayreuth
, where they also saw Parsifal
. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth. This short, skittish piano work for four hands sends up themes from The Ring. Fauré admired Wagner and was familiar with the smallest details of his music, but he was one of the few composers of his generation not to come under Wagner's musical influence.
. The marriage was affectionate, but Marie became resentful of Fauré's frequent absences, his "horreur du domicile", and his love affairs, while she remained at home. After a romantic attachment to the singer Emma Bardac
from around 1892, possibly followed by another to the composer Adela Maddison
, in 1900 Fauré met the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, the daughter of Alphonse Hasselmans
. This led to a relationship which lasted for the rest of Fauré's life; he maintained her in a Paris apartment, and she acted openly as his companion.
Fauré and his wife had two sons, the first, born in 1883, Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet
(Marie insisted on combining her family name with Fauré's), became a biologist of international reputation; the second son Philippe was born in 1889. To support his family, Fauré spent most of his time in running the daily services at the Madeleine and teaching piano and harmony lessons. His compositions earned him a negligible amount, because his publisher bought them outright for 50 francs
each, and Fauré received no royalties. During this period, he wrote several large-scale works, in addition to many piano pieces and songs, but he destroyed most of them after a few performances, only retaining a few movements in order to re-use motifs.
As a young man, Fauré had been very cheerful; a friend wrote of his "youthful, even somewhat child-like, mirth." His broken engagement, combined with his lack of success as a composer, precipitated bouts of depression, which he described as "spleen". In the 1890s, however, his fortunes improved. When Ernest Guiraud
, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire
, died in 1892, Saint-Saëns encouraged Fauré to apply for the vacant post. The conservative establishment at the Conservatoire regarded Fauré as dangerously modern, and their head, Ambroise Thomas
, blocked the appointment, declaring, "Fauré? Never! If he's appointed, I resign." However, Fauré was appointed to another of Guiraud's posts, inspector of the music conservatories in the French provinces, which meant prolonged travelling around the country, but gave him a steady income and enabled him to give up teaching amateur pupils.
In 1896, Ambroise Thomas died, and Théodore Dubois took over as head of the Conservatoire. Fauré succeeded Dubois as chief organist of the Madeleine. Dubois' move had further repercussions: Jules Massenet
, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, had expected to succeed Thomas, but had overplayed his hand by insisting on being appointed for life. He was turned down, Dubois was appointed instead of him, and Massenet resigned in fury. Fauré was appointed professor of composition in his place. He taught many young composers, including Maurice Ravel
, Florent Schmitt
, Charles Koechlin
, Louis Aubert
, Jean Roger-Ducasse
, George Enescu
, Paul Ladmirault
, Alfredo Casella
and Nadia Boulanger
. In Fauré's view, his students needed a firm grounding in the basic skills, which he was happy to delegate to his capable assistant André Gedalge
. His own part came in helping them make use of these skills in the way that suited each student's talents. Roger-Ducasse later wrote: "Taking up whatever the pupils were working on, he would evoke the rules of the form at hand ... and refer to examples, always drawn from the masters." Ravel always remembered Fauré's open-mindedness as a teacher. Having received Ravel's string quartet with less than his usual enthusiasm, Fauré asked to see the manuscript again a few days later, saying, "I could have been wrong". The musicologist Henri Prunières wrote, "What Fauré developed among his pupils was taste, harmonic sensibility, the love of pure lines, of unexpected and colorful modulations; but he never gave them receipts for composing according to his style and that is why they all sought and found their own paths in many different, and often opposed, directions."
Fauré's works of the last years of the century include incidental music
for the English premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck
's Pelléas et Mélisande
(1898), and Prométhée
, a lyric tragedy composed for the amphitheatre at Béziers
. Being written for outdoor performance, the work is scored for huge instrumental and vocal forces. Its premiere in August 1900 was a great success, and it was revived at Béziers the following year and in Paris in 1907. A version with orchestration for normal opera house-sized forces was given at the Paris Opéra
in May 1917 and received more than 40 performances in Paris thereafter. From 1903 to 1921, Fauré regularly wrote music criticism for Le Figaro
, a role in which he was not at ease. His biographer Jean-Michel Nectoux writes that Fauré's natural kindness and broad-mindedness predisposed him to emphasise the positive aspects of a work.
. Fauré's pupil, Maurice Ravel
, was widely believed to have been unfairly denied the prize by reactionary elements within the Conservatoire. Dubois was the subject of much censure, and resigned. Fauré was appointed in his place. With the support of the French government, he made sweeping changes to the administration and the curriculum. He introduced independent external judges to take part in decisions on admissions, examinations and competitions. This precipitated resignations by some faculty members: unable to give preferential treatment to their private pupils, they saw themselves deprived of a considerable extra income. With the curriculum, Fauré was seen as equally revolutionary; he was dubbed "Robespierre
" by disaffected members of the old guard. He modernised and broadened the range of music taught at the Conservatoire. As Nectoux puts it, "where Auber
, Halévy
and especially Meyerbeer
had reigned supreme … it was now possible to sing an aria by Rameau
or even some Wagner – up to now a forbidden name within the Conservatoire's walls". The repertoire now ranged from Renaissance polyphony to the works of Debussy
.
Fauré's new position meant that he was financially better off, and he also became much more widely known as a composer. Running the Conservatoire, however, left him with no more time for composition than when he was scraping a living as an organist and piano teacher. As soon as the working year was over, in the last days of July, he would leave Paris and spend the two months until early October in an hotel, usually by one of the Swiss lakes, to concentrate on composition. His works from this period include his lyric opera, Pénélope
, and some of his most characteristic later songs (e.g., the cycle La chanson d'Ève
, Op. 95) and piano pieces (Nocturnes Nos. 9–11; Barcarolles Nos. 7–11).
Fauré was elected to the Institut de France
in 1909. His father-in-law and Saint-Saëns, both long-established members, canvassed strongly on his behalf, and he won the ballot, with 18 votes against 16 for the other candidate, Widor. In the same year, a group of young composers led by Ravel and Koechlin broke with the Société Nationale de Musique, which under the presidency of Vincent d'Indy had become a reactionary organisation. They formed a new group, the Société Musicale Indépendante, of which Fauré accepted the presidency. He also remained a member of the older society and continued to be on the best of terms with d'Indy; his sole concern was the fostering of new music. In 1911 he oversaw the Conservatoire's move to new premises in the rue de Madrid. During this time, Fauré developed ear trouble and gradually lost his hearing. Sound not only became fainter, but it was also distorted, so that pitches on the low and high ends of his audible range sounded like other pitches. He made efforts to conceal his difficulty but was eventually forced to abandon his teaching position.
In the early years of the century, Fauré's music began to gain a foothold in Britain, and to a lesser extent in Germany, Spain and Russia. He was a frequent visitor to England, and he was invited to play at Buckingham Palace
in 1908, which opened many doors for him in London and beyond. He attended the London premiere of Elgar
's First Symphony
in 1908, and dined with Elgar afterwards. Elgar later wrote to their mutual friend Frank Schuster
that Fauré "was such a real gentleman – the highest kind of Frenchman and I admired him greatly." Elgar tried to get Fauré's Requiem
put on at the Three Choirs Festival
, but it did not finally have its English premiere until 1937, nearly fifty years after its first performance in France. Composers from other countries also loved and admired Fauré. Tchaikovsky
had thought him "adorable", Albéniz
and Fauré were friends and correspondents for many years, Richard Strauss
sought his advice, and in Fauré's last years, the young Aaron Copland
was a devoted admirer.
The outbreak of World War I almost stranded Fauré in Germany, where he had gone for his annual composing retreat. He managed to get from Germany into Switzerland, and thence to Paris. He remained in France for the duration of the war. When a group of French musicians led by Saint-Saëns tried to organise a boycott of German music, Fauré and Messager dissociated themselves from the idea, though the disagreement did not affect their friendship with Saint-Saëns. Fauré did not recognise nationalism in music, seeing in his art "a language belonging to a country so far above all others that it is dragged down when it has to express feelings or individual traits that belong to any particular nation." Nevertheless, he was aware that his own music was respected rather than loved in Germany. In January 1905, visiting Frankfurt
and Cologne
for concerts of his music, he had written: "The criticisms of my music have been that it's a bit cold and too well brought up! There's no question about it, French and German are two different things."
, an honour rare for a musician. In 1922 there was a public tribute paid to him in a national hommage, "a splendid celebration at the Sorbonne
, in which the most illustrious French artists participated, brought him great joy. It was a poignant spectacle, indeed: that of a man present at a concert of his own works and able to hear not a single note. He sat gazing before him pensively, and, in spite of everything, grateful and content."
In his last years, Fauré suffered from poor health, partly brought on by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les six
, who were devoted to him. Nectoux writes: "In old age he attained a kind of serenity, without losing any of his remarkable spiritual vitality, but rather removed from the sensualism and the passion of the works he wrote between 1875 and 1895."
Fauré died in Paris from pneumonia
on 4 November 1924 at the age of 79. He was given a state funeral at the Église de la Madeleine and is buried in the Passy Cemetery
in Paris.
After Fauré's death, the Conservatoire reverted to its former conservatism, with his own harmonic practice being held up as the farthest limit of modernity, beyond which students should not go. The generation of students born between the wars rejected this outdated premise, turning instead to Bartók
, the Second Viennese School and the latest works of Stravinsky
.
In a centenary tribute, the musicologist Leslie Orrey wrote in The Musical Times
: "'More profound than Saint-Saëns, more varied than Lalo
, more spontaneous than d'Indy
, more classic than Debussy, Gabriel Fauré is the master par excellence of French music, the perfect mirror of our musical genius.' Perhaps, when English musicians get to know his work better, these words of Roger-Ducasse
will seem, not over-praise, but no more than his due."
Aaron Copland
wrote that although Fauré's works can be divided into the usual three periods, there is no such radical difference between his first and last manners as is evident with many other composers. Copland found premonitions of Fauré's last manner in even his earliest works, and traces of the early Fauré in the works of his old age: "The themes, harmonies, form, have remained essentially the same, but with each new work they have all become more fresh, more personal, more profound."
Influences on Fauré, particularly in his early work, included Mozart, Chopin and Schumann. The authors of The Record Guide
(1955) wrote that Fauré learnt restraint and beauty of surface from Mozart, tonal freedom and long melodic lines from Chopin, "and from Schumann, the sudden felicities in which his development sections abound, and those codas in which whole movements are briefly but magically illuminated." His work was based on the strong understanding of harmonic structures that he gained at the École Niedermeyer
from Niedermeyer's successor Gustave Lefèvre. Lefèvre wrote the book Traité d'harmonie (Paris, 1889), in which he sets out a harmonic theory that differs significantly from the classical theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau
, no longer outlawing certain chords as "dissonant
". By using unresolved mild discords and colouristic effects, Fauré anticipated the techniques of Impressionist
composers.
In contrast with his harmonic and melodic style, which pushed the bounds for his time, Fauré's rhythmic motives tended to be subtle and repetitive, with little to break the flow of the line, although he used discreet syncopations, similar to those found in Brahms
's works. Copland referred to him as "the Brahms of France". Jerry Dubins posited in 2007 in Fanfare Magazine
that Fauré is the "missing link" between Brahms and Debussy
.
To Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, Fauré's later works do not display the easy charm of his earlier music: "the luscious romantic harmony which had always been firmly supported by a single tonality, later gave way to a severely monochrome style, full of enharmonic shifts, and creating the impression of several tonal centres simultaneously employed."
. In Copland's view, the early songs were written under the influence of Gounod
, and except for isolated songs such as "Après un rêve" or "Au bord de l'eau" there is little sign of the artist to come. With the second volume of the sixty collected songs, Copland judged, came the first mature examples of "the real Fauré". He instanced "Les berceaux", "Les roses d'Ispahan" and especially "Clair de lune
" as "so beautiful, so perfect, that they have even penetrated to America", and drew attention to less well known mélodies such as "Le secret", "Nocturne", and "Les présents". Fauré also composed a number of song cycle
s. Cinq mélodies "de Venise"
, Op. 58, was described by Fauré as a novel kind of song suite
, in its use of musical themes
recurring over the cycle. For the later cycle La bonne chanson
, Op. 61, there were five such themes, according to Fauré. He also wrote that La bonne chanson was his most spontaneous composition, with Emma Bardac singing back to him each day's newly written material.
The Requiem
, Op. 48, was not composed to the memory of a specific person but, in Fauré's words, "for the pleasure of it." It was first performed in 1888. It has been described as "a lullaby of death" because of its predominantly gentle tone. Fauré omitted the Dies Irae
, though reference to the day of judgment appears in the Libera me, which, like Verdi
, he added to the normal liturgical text. Fauré revised the Requiem over the years, and a number of different performing versions are now in use, from the earliest, for small forces, to the final revision with full orchestra.
Fauré's operas have not found a place in the regular repertoire. Copland called Pénélope
a fascinating work, and one of the best operas written since Wagner. He noted, however, that the music is, as a whole, "distinctly non-theatrical." The work uses leitmotif
s, and the two main roles call for voices of heroic quality, but these are the only ways in which the work is Wagnerian. In Fauré's late style, "tonality is stretched hard, without breaking."
figures, with the melody interspersed between the two hands, and include finger substitutions natural for organists. These aspects make them daunting for some pianists, and even a virtuoso like Liszt found Fauré's piano music hard to play. The early piano works are clearly influenced by Chopin. An even greater influence was Schumann
, whose piano music Fauré loved more than any other. With the sixth Nocturne, Fauré fully emerged from any predecessor's shadow. The pianist Alfred Cortot
said, "There are few pages in all music comparable to these." The critic Bryce Morrison has noted that pianists frequently prefer to play the charming earlier piano works, such as the Impromptu No. 2, rather than the later piano works, which express "such private passion and isolation, such alternating anger and resignation" that listeners are left uneasy. Fauré was unimpressed by purely virtuoso pianists, saying, "the greater they are, the worse they play me."
Fauré wrote the Dolly Suite
for piano four-hands
between 1894 and 1897 and dedicated it to Hélène, daughter of Emma Bardac.
and Charles Koechlin
to orchestrate his concert and theatre works. His generally sober orchestral style reflects a definite aesthetic attitude. He was not attracted by striking combinations of tone-colours, which he thought were too often a form of self-indulgence and a disguise for the absence of ideas. In Nectoux's words, "The idea of timbre was not a determining one in Fauré's musical thinking". His best-known orchestral works are the orchestral suite Masques et bergamasques (based on music for a dramatic entertainment, or divertissement comique), and music for Pelléas et Mélisande
.
In the chamber
repertoire, his two piano quartet
s, particularly the first, are among Fauré's better-known works. His other chamber music includes two piano quintet
s, two cello sonata
s, two violin sonata
s, a piano trio
and a string quartet
. Copland (writing in 1924 before the string quartet was finished) held the second quintet to be Fauré's masterpiece: "... a pure well of spirituality ... extremely classic, as far removed as possible from the romantic temperament." Other critics have taken a less favourable view: "The ceaseless flow and restricted colour scheme of Fauré's last manner, as exemplified in this Quintet, need very careful management, if they are not to become tedious." Fauré's last work, the String Quartet
, has been described as an intimate meditation on the last things, and "an extraordinary work by any standards, ethereal and other-worldly with themes that seem constantly to be drawn skywards."
. In the 1930s better-known performers recorded Fauré pieces, including Georges Thill
("En prière"), and Jacques Thibaud
and Alfred Cortot
(Violin Sonata No. 1 and Berceuse). Some of the orchestral music for Pelléas et Mélisande was recorded in 1938.
By the 1940s there were a few more Fauré works in the catalogues. A survey by John Culshaw
in December 1945 singled out recordings of piano works played by Kathleen Long
(including the Nocturne No. 6, Barcarolle No. 2, the Thème et Variations, Op. 73, and the Ballade Op. 19 in its orchestral version conducted by Boyd Neel
), the Requiem conducted by Ernest Bourmauck, and seven songs sung by Maggie Teyte
. Fauré's music began to appear more frequently in the record companies' releases in the 1950s. The Record Guide
, 1955, listed the Piano Quartet No. 1, Piano Quintet No. 2, the String Quartet, both Violin Sonatas, the Cello Sonata No. 2, two new recordings of the Requiem, and the complete song cycles La bonne chanson and La chanson d'Ève.
In the LP and particularly the CD era, the record companies have built up a substantial catalogue of Fauré's music, performed by French and non-French musicians. Sets of his major orchestral works have been recorded under conductors including Michel Plasson
(1981) and Yan Pascal Tortelier
(1996). Fauré's main chamber works have all been recorded, with players including the Ysaÿe Quartet, Domus
, Paul Tortelier
, Arthur Grumiaux
, and Joshua Bell
. The complete piano works have been recorded by Kathryn Stott
(1995), and Paul Crossley
(1984–85), with substantial sets of the major piano works from Jean-Philippe Collard
(1982–84), Pascal Rogé
(1990), and Kun-Woo Paik
(2002). Fauré's songs have all been recorded for CD, including a complete set (2005), anchored by the accompanist Graham Johnson, with soloists Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
, Felicity Lott
, John Mark Ainsley
and Jennifer Smith, among others. The Requiem and the shorter choral works are also well-represented on disc. Pénélope
has been recorded twice, with casts headed by Régine Crespin
in 1956, and Jessye Norman
in 1981, conducted respectively by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht
and Charles Dutoit
. Prométhée has not been recorded in full, but extensive excerpts were recorded under Roger Norrington
(1980).
concludes thus:
Fauré's biographer, Nectoux, writes in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, that Fauré is widely regarded as the greatest master of French song, and that alongside the songs the chamber works rank as "Fauré's most important contribution to music". The critic Robert Orledge writes, "His genius was one of synthesis: he reconciled such opposing elements as modality and tonality, anguish and serenity, seduction and force within a single non-eclectic style, as in the Pelléas et Mélisande suite, his symphonic masterpiece. The quality of constant renewal within an apparently limited range … is a remarkable facet of his genius, and the spare, elliptical style of his single String Quartet suggests that his intensely self-disciplined style was still developing at the time of his death."
Clair de lune (Fauré)
"Clair de lune", Op. 46 No 2, is a song by Gabriel Fauré, composed in 1887 to words by Paul Verlaine. The pianist Graham Johnson writes that it closes Fauré's second period and opens the doors into his third. Johnson notes that it is "for many people the quintessential French mélodie".The lyric is...
, and his Pavane
Pavane (Fauré)
The Pavane in F-sharp minor, Op. 50, is a composition by the French composer Gabriel Fauré, written in 1887. It was originally a piano piece, but is better known in Fauré's version for orchestra and optional chorus...
and Requiem
Requiem (Fauré)
Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in D minor, Op. 48 between 1887 and 1890. This choral–orchestral setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead is the best known of his large works. The most famous movement is the soprano aria Pie Jesu...
.
Born into a cultured but not unusually musical family, Fauré revealed his talent when he was a small boy. He was sent to a music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
, who became a lifelong friend. In his early years, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine
Église de la Madeleine
L'église de la Madeleine is a Roman Catholic church occupying a commanding position in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. It was designed in its present form as a temple to the glory of Napoleon's army...
and head of the Paris Conservatoire
Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...
, he still lacked time for composing, retreating to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition.
By his last years, Fauré was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922 headed by the President of the Republic. Fauré had many admirers in England, but his music, though known in other countries, took decades more to become widely accepted. His music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of his death the atonal
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
music of the Second Viennese School
Second Viennese School
The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where he lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925...
was being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is the largest single reference work on Western music. The dictionary has gone through several editions since the 19th century...
, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations affected the teaching of harmony for later generations. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his last works, written when increasing deafness had struck him, are elusive and withdrawn in character.
Early years
Fauré was born in PamiersPamiers
Pamiers is a commune in the Ariège department in the Midi-Pyrénées region in southwestern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department. Although Pamiers is the largest city in Ariège, the capital is the smaller town of Foix...
, Ariège, Midi-Pyrénées, on 12 May 1845, the fifth son and sixth child of Toussaint-Honoré Fauré (1810–85) and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade (1809–87). He was sent to live with a wet nurse
Wet nurse
A wet nurse is a woman who is used to breast feed and care for another's child. Wet nurses are used when the mother is unable or chooses not to nurse the child herself. Wet-nursed children may be known as "milk-siblings", and in some cultures the families are linked by a special relationship of...
until he was four years old. In 1849 Toussaint-Honoré was appointed director of the École Normale at Montgauzy, near Foix
Foix
Foix is a commune, the capital of the Ariège department in southwestern France. It is the least populous administrative centre of a department in all of France, although it is only very slightly smaller than Privas...
, and Fauré returned to live with his family. There was a chapel attached to the school, and the young Fauré spent hours playing the harmonium
Harmonium
A harmonium is a free-standing keyboard instrument similar to a reed organ. Sound is produced by air being blown through sets of free reeds, resulting in a sound similar to that of an accordion...
there. An old blind woman, who came to listen and give the boy advice, told his father of Fauré's gift for music. In 1853 an official of the National Assembly of France, Dufaur de Saubiac, heard Fauré and advised his father to send him to the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse (School of Classical and Religious Music), which Louis Niedermeyer
Louis Niedermeyer
Abraham Louis Niedermeyer was a composer chiefly of church music but also of a few operas, and a teacher who took over the Ecole Choron, duly renamed École Niedermeyer, a school for the study and practice of church music, where several eminent French musicians studied including Gabriel Fauré and...
was setting up in Paris. After reflecting for a year, Fauré's father agreed and took the 9-year-old boy to Paris in October 1854.
Fauré remained a boarder at the school for 11 years, during which he was helped by a scholarship from the bishop of his home diocese. The régime at the school was austere, the rooms were gloomy, the food was mediocre, and the boys were required to wear an elaborate uniform. The musical tuition, however, was excellent. Under Niedermeyer, the curriculum concentrated on church music, with the aim of producing qualified organists and choirmasters. Fauré's tutors were Clément Loret for the organ, Louis Dietsch for harmony, Xavier Wackenthaler for counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
and fugue
Fugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....
, and Niedermeyer for the piano, plainsong
Plainsong
Plainsong is a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Catholic Church. Though the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church did not split until long after the origin of plainchant, Byzantine chants are generally not classified as plainsong.Plainsong is monophonic, consisting of a...
and composition.
In March 1861 Niedermeyer died. Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
, who took his place in charge of piano studies, introduced his students to contemporary music, including that of Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
, Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
and Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
. He took great pleasure in the progress of the gifted young Fauré. The two became close friends and remained so until Saint-Saëns died sixty years later. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including premiers prix in composition for the Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11, the earliest of his choral works to enter the regular repertory. He left the school in July 1865, as a Laureat in organ, piano, harmony and composition, with a Maître de Chapelle diploma.
First musical appointments
On leaving the École Niedermeyer, Fauré was appointed chief organist at the Church of Saint-Sauveur, at RennesRennes
Rennes is a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France. Rennes is the capital of the region of Brittany, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine department.-History:...
in Brittany. During his four years there he supplemented his income by taking private pupils, giving "countless piano lessons". He was bored at Rennes and had an uneasy relationship with the parish priest, who rightly doubted Fauré's religious conviction. Fauré was regularly seen stealing out during the sermon for a cigarette, and in early 1870, when he turned up to play at Mass
Mass (liturgy)
"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...
one Sunday still in his evening clothes having been out all night at a ball, he was asked to resign. Almost immediately he secured the post of assistant organist at the church of Notre-Dame de Clignancourt, in the north of Paris. He remained there for only a few months; on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
in 1870, he volunteered for military service. He took part in the action to raise the Siege of Paris
Siege of Paris
The Siege of Paris, lasting from September 19, 1870 – January 28, 1871, and the consequent capture of the city by Prussian forces led to French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the establishment of the German Empire as well as the Paris Commune....
and saw action at Le Bourget
Battle of Le Bourget
The Battle of Le Bourget was part of the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, fought between 27 and 30 September 1870.-Background:...
, Champigny
Champigny, Marne
Champigny is a commune in the Marne department in north-eastern France....
and Créteil
Créteil
-Health:As of 1 January 2006, 27 pharmacies, about 60 dentists, about 60 general practitioners, 10 pediatricians, and a half-dozen ophthalmologists and dermatologists constitute the general medical staff of the city.Health facilities include:...
.
After France's defeat by Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
, there was a brief, bloody conflict within Paris, during the Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
. Fauré escaped to Rambouillet
Rambouillet
Rambouillet is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France.It is located in the suburbs of Paris southwest from the center...
where one of his brothers lived, and then travelled to Switzerland, where he took up a teaching post at the École Niedermeyer, which had temporarily relocated there to avoid the violence in Paris. His first pupil at the school was André Messager
André Messager
André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international...
, who became a lifelong friend and occasional collaborator. When Fauré returned to Paris in October 1871, he was appointed choirmaster at the Église Saint-Sulpice under the composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor
Charles-Marie Widor
Charles-Marie Jean Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher.-Life:Widor was born in Lyon, to a family of organ builders, and initially studied music there with his father, François-Charles Widor, titular organist of Saint-François-de-Sales from 1838 to 1889...
. He regularly attended Saint-Saëns's musical salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
gatherings and those of Pauline Viardot, to whom Saint-Saëns introduced him. He was an early member of the Société Nationale de Musique
Société Nationale de Musique
The Société Nationale de Musique was founded on February 25, 1871 to promote French music and to allow young composers to present their music in public...
, formed in February 1871 under the joint chairmanship of Romain Bussine
Romain Bussine
Romain Bussine was a French poet, baritone, and voice teacher who lived during the 19th century.In 1871, together with Camille Saint-Saëns and Henri Duparc, he founded the Société Nationale de Musique as a forum for promoting contemporary French chamber and orchestral music...
and Saint-Saëns, to promote new French music. Other members included Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...
, Emmanuel Chabrier
Emmanuel Chabrier
Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas , songs, and piano music as well...
, Henri Duparc, Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
, César Franck
César Franck
César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....
, Édouard Lalo
Édouard Lalo
Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer.-Biography:Lalo was born in Lille , in northernmost France. He attended that city's music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berlioz's old enemy François Antoine Habeneck...
and Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...
. Fauré became secretary of the society in 1874. Many of his works were first presented at the society's concerts.
In 1874, Fauré moved from Saint-Sulpice to the Église de la Madeleine
Église de la Madeleine
L'église de la Madeleine is a Roman Catholic church occupying a commanding position in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. It was designed in its present form as a temple to the glory of Napoleon's army...
, deputising for the principal organist, Saint-Saëns, during the latter's many absences on tour. Some admirers of Fauré's music have expressed regret that although he played the organ professionally for four decades, he left no solo compositions for the instrument. Saint-Saëns said of Fauré that he was "a first class organist when he wanted to be", and he was renowned for his improvisations. Nevertheless, he preferred the piano to the organ, which he played only because it gave him a regular income.
1877 was a significant year for Fauré, both professionally and personally. In January his violin sonata
Violin sonata
A violin sonata is a musical composition for violin, which is nearly always accompanied by a piano or other keyboard instrument, or by figured bass in the Baroque period.-A:*Ella Adayevskaya**Sonata Greca for Violin or Clarinet and Piano...
was performed at a Société Nationale concert with great success, marking a turning-point in his composing career. In March, Saint-Saëns retired from the Madeleine, succeeded as organist by Théodore Dubois
Théodore Dubois
François-Clément Théodore Dubois was a French composer, organist and music teacher.-Biography:Théodore Dubois was born in Rosnay in Marne. He studied first under Louis Fanart and later at the Paris Conservatoire under Ambroise Thomas. He won the Prix de Rome in 1861...
, his choirmaster, to which subordinate post Fauré was now appointed. In July Fauré became engaged to Pauline Viardot's daughter Marianne, with whom he was deeply in love. To his great sorrow, she broke off the engagement in November 1877, for reasons that are not clear. To distract Fauré, Saint-Saëns took him to Weimar
Weimar
Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...
and introduced him to Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
. This visit gave Fauré a liking for foreign travel, which he pursued for the rest of his life. From 1878, he and Messager made trips abroad to see Wagner operas. They saw Das Rheingold
Das Rheingold
is the first of the four operas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen . It was originally written as an introduction to the tripartite Ring, but the cycle is now generally regarded as consisting of four individual operas.Das Rheingold received its premiere at the National Theatre...
and Die Walküre
Die Walküre
Die Walküre , WWV 86B, is the second of the four operas that form the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen , by Richard Wagner...
at Cologne Opera
Cologne Opera
The Cologne Opera refers both to the main opera house in Cologne, Germany and to its resident opera company.-History of the company:...
; the complete Ring
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...
cycle at the Hofoper
Bavarian State Opera
The Bavarian State Opera is an opera company based in Munich, Germany.Its orchestra is the Bavarian State Orchestra.- History:The opera company which was founded under Princess Henriette Adelaide of Savoy has been in existence since 1653...
in Munich and at Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre is a West End theatre, in Haymarket, City of Westminster, London. The present building was designed by Charles J. Phipps and was constructed in 1897 for actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who established the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the theatre...
in London; and Die Meistersinger
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is an opera in three acts, written and composed by Richard Wagner. It is among the longest operas still commonly performed today, usually taking around four and a half hours. It was first performed at the Königliches Hof- und National-Theater in Munich, on June 21,...
in Munich and at Bayreuth
Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented...
, where they also saw Parsifal
Parsifal
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...
. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth. This short, skittish piano work for four hands sends up themes from The Ring. Fauré admired Wagner and was familiar with the smallest details of his music, but he was one of the few composers of his generation not to come under Wagner's musical influence.
Middle years
In 1883, Fauré married Marie Fremiet, the daughter of a leading sculptor Emmanuel FremietEmmanuel Frémiet
Emmanuel Frémiet was a French sculptor. He is famous for his sculpture of Joan of Arc in Paris and the monument to Ferdinand de Lesseps in Suez....
. The marriage was affectionate, but Marie became resentful of Fauré's frequent absences, his "horreur du domicile", and his love affairs, while she remained at home. After a romantic attachment to the singer Emma Bardac
Emma Bardac
Emma Bardac , née Moyse, was the mutual love interest of both Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. Of Jewish descent, Emma married, aged 17, Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac, by whom she had two children, Raoul, and Hélène . Emma was an accomplished singer and brilliant conversationalist...
from around 1892, possibly followed by another to the composer Adela Maddison
Adela Maddison
Katharine Mary Adela Maddison, née Tindal , usually known as Adela Maddison, was a British composer of operas, ballets, instrumental music and songs. She was also a concert producer...
, in 1900 Fauré met the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, the daughter of Alphonse Hasselmans
Alphonse Hasselmans
Alphonse Hasselmans was a Belgian-born French harpist, composer, and pedagogue.-Biography:Hasselmans was born in Liège, Belgium. He composed several dozen original solos for harp, of which his most famous is a concert étude entitled La Source , op. 44...
. This led to a relationship which lasted for the rest of Fauré's life; he maintained her in a Paris apartment, and she acted openly as his companion.
Fauré and his wife had two sons, the first, born in 1883, Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet
Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet
Emmanuel Fauré-Fremiet FMRS was a French biologist.-Life:He was the son of Gabriel Fauré, and Marie Fremiet, .He was a professor at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France....
(Marie insisted on combining her family name with Fauré's), became a biologist of international reputation; the second son Philippe was born in 1889. To support his family, Fauré spent most of his time in running the daily services at the Madeleine and teaching piano and harmony lessons. His compositions earned him a negligible amount, because his publisher bought them outright for 50 francs
French franc
The franc was a currency of France. Along with the Spanish peseta, it was also a de facto currency used in Andorra . Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money...
each, and Fauré received no royalties. During this period, he wrote several large-scale works, in addition to many piano pieces and songs, but he destroyed most of them after a few performances, only retaining a few movements in order to re-use motifs.
As a young man, Fauré had been very cheerful; a friend wrote of his "youthful, even somewhat child-like, mirth." His broken engagement, combined with his lack of success as a composer, precipitated bouts of depression, which he described as "spleen". In the 1890s, however, his fortunes improved. When Ernest Guiraud
Ernest Guiraud
Ernest Guiraud was a French composer and music teacher born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is best known for writing the traditional orchestral recitatives used for Bizet's opera Carmen and for Offenbach's opera Les contes d'Hoffmann .- Biography :Guiraud began his schooling in Louisiana under the...
, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire
Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...
, died in 1892, Saint-Saëns encouraged Fauré to apply for the vacant post. The conservative establishment at the Conservatoire regarded Fauré as dangerously modern, and their head, Ambroise Thomas
Ambroise Thomas
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer, best known for his operas Mignon and Hamlet and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death.-Biography:"There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas."- Emmanuel Chabrier-Early life...
, blocked the appointment, declaring, "Fauré? Never! If he's appointed, I resign." However, Fauré was appointed to another of Guiraud's posts, inspector of the music conservatories in the French provinces, which meant prolonged travelling around the country, but gave him a steady income and enabled him to give up teaching amateur pupils.
In 1896, Ambroise Thomas died, and Théodore Dubois took over as head of the Conservatoire. Fauré succeeded Dubois as chief organist of the Madeleine. Dubois' move had further repercussions: Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...
, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, had expected to succeed Thomas, but had overplayed his hand by insisting on being appointed for life. He was turned down, Dubois was appointed instead of him, and Massenet resigned in fury. Fauré was appointed professor of composition in his place. He taught many young composers, including Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, Florent Schmitt
Florent Schmitt
Florent Schmitt was a French composer.-Early life:A Lorrainer, born in Meurthe-et-Moselle, Schmitt originally took music lessons in Nancy with the local composer Gustave Sandré. Subsequently he entered the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied with Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois,...
, Charles Koechlin
Charles Koechlin
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars , travelling, stereoscopic...
, Louis Aubert
Louis Aubert
Louis François Marie Aubert was a French composer.-Biography:Louis Aubert was a child prodigy. His parents, recognizing their son's musical talent, sent him to Paris to receive an education at an early age...
, Jean Roger-Ducasse
Jean Roger-Ducasse
Jean Jules Amable Roger-Ducasse was a French composer.-Biography:Jean Roger-Ducasse studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Emile Pessard and André Gedalge, and was the star pupil and close friend of Gabriel Fauré...
, George Enescu
George Enescu
George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...
, Paul Ladmirault
Paul Ladmirault
Paul Ladmirault was a French composer whose music expressed his devotion to Brittany.-Life:Ladmirault was born in Nantes. A child prodigy, he learned piano, organ and violin from an early age. At the age of 8, he composed a sonata for violin and piano. At the age of fifteen, when still a student...
, Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...
and Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many composers and performers of the 20th century.From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but believing that her talent as a composer was inferior to that of her younger...
. In Fauré's view, his students needed a firm grounding in the basic skills, which he was happy to delegate to his capable assistant André Gedalge
André Gedalge
André Gedalge , was an influential French composer and teacher.- Biography :André Gedalge was born at 75 rue des Saints-Pères, in Paris, where he first worked as a bookseller and editor specializing in livres de prix for public schools...
. His own part came in helping them make use of these skills in the way that suited each student's talents. Roger-Ducasse later wrote: "Taking up whatever the pupils were working on, he would evoke the rules of the form at hand ... and refer to examples, always drawn from the masters." Ravel always remembered Fauré's open-mindedness as a teacher. Having received Ravel's string quartet with less than his usual enthusiasm, Fauré asked to see the manuscript again a few days later, saying, "I could have been wrong". The musicologist Henri Prunières wrote, "What Fauré developed among his pupils was taste, harmonic sensibility, the love of pure lines, of unexpected and colorful modulations; but he never gave them receipts for composing according to his style and that is why they all sought and found their own paths in many different, and often opposed, directions."
Fauré's works of the last years of the century include incidental music
Incidental music
Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, film or some other form not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as the "film score" or "soundtrack"....
for the English premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
's Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas and Mélisande
Pelléas and Mélisande is a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in 1893....
(1898), and Prométhée
Prométhée
Prométhée is an opera in three acts by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. The libretto, by Jean Lorrain and Ferdinand Hérold, is based on the Greek myth of Prometheus. Although designated a tragédie lyrique, the opera resists easy categorisation. It was intended as a large-scale work with spoken...
, a lyric tragedy composed for the amphitheatre at Béziers
Béziers
Béziers is a town in Languedoc in southern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the Hérault department. Béziers hosts the famous Feria de Béziers, centred around bullfighting, every August. A million visitors are attracted to the five-day event...
. Being written for outdoor performance, the work is scored for huge instrumental and vocal forces. Its premiere in August 1900 was a great success, and it was revived at Béziers the following year and in Paris in 1907. A version with orchestration for normal opera house-sized forces was given at the Paris Opéra
Paris Opera
The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of Paris, France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique...
in May 1917 and received more than 40 performances in Paris thereafter. From 1903 to 1921, Fauré regularly wrote music criticism for Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
, a role in which he was not at ease. His biographer Jean-Michel Nectoux writes that Fauré's natural kindness and broad-mindedness predisposed him to emphasise the positive aspects of a work.
Head of Paris Conservatoire
In 1905, there was a scandal in French musical circles over the country's top musical prize, the Prix de RomePrix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
. Fauré's pupil, Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, was widely believed to have been unfairly denied the prize by reactionary elements within the Conservatoire. Dubois was the subject of much censure, and resigned. Fauré was appointed in his place. With the support of the French government, he made sweeping changes to the administration and the curriculum. He introduced independent external judges to take part in decisions on admissions, examinations and competitions. This precipitated resignations by some faculty members: unable to give preferential treatment to their private pupils, they saw themselves deprived of a considerable extra income. With the curriculum, Fauré was seen as equally revolutionary; he was dubbed "Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre is one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. He largely dominated the Committee of Public Safety and was instrumental in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended with his...
" by disaffected members of the old guard. He modernised and broadened the range of music taught at the Conservatoire. As Nectoux puts it, "where Auber
Daniel Auber
Daniel François Esprit Auber was a French composer.-Biography:The son of a Paris print-seller, Auber was born in Caen in Normandy. Though his father expected him to continue in the print-selling business, he also allowed his son to learn how to play several musical instruments...
, Halévy
Fromental Halévy
Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy, usually known as Fromental Halévy , was a French composer. He is known today largely for his opera La Juive.-Early career:...
and especially Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a noted German opera composer, and the first great exponent of "grand opera." At his peak in the 1830s and 1840s, he was the most famous and successful composer of opera in Europe, yet he is rarely performed today.-Early years:He was born to a Jewish family in Tasdorf , near...
had reigned supreme … it was now possible to sing an aria by Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François...
or even some Wagner – up to now a forbidden name within the Conservatoire's walls". The repertoire now ranged from Renaissance polyphony to the works of Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
.
Fauré's new position meant that he was financially better off, and he also became much more widely known as a composer. Running the Conservatoire, however, left him with no more time for composition than when he was scraping a living as an organist and piano teacher. As soon as the working year was over, in the last days of July, he would leave Paris and spend the two months until early October in an hotel, usually by one of the Swiss lakes, to concentrate on composition. His works from this period include his lyric opera, Pénélope
Pénélope
Pénélope is an opera in three acts by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. The libretto, by René Fauchois, is based on Homer's Odyssey. It was first performed at the Salle Garnier, Monte Carlo on 4 March 1913.-Background and performance history:...
, and some of his most characteristic later songs (e.g., the cycle La chanson d'Ève
La chanson d'Ève
La chanson d'Ève, Op. 95, is a song cycle by Gabriel Fauré, of ten mélodies for voice and piano. Composed during 1906–10, it is based on the collection of poetry of the same name by Charles van Lerberghe. It is Fauré's longest song cycle.-Composition:...
, Op. 95) and piano pieces (Nocturnes Nos. 9–11; Barcarolles Nos. 7–11).
Fauré was elected to the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
in 1909. His father-in-law and Saint-Saëns, both long-established members, canvassed strongly on his behalf, and he won the ballot, with 18 votes against 16 for the other candidate, Widor. In the same year, a group of young composers led by Ravel and Koechlin broke with the Société Nationale de Musique, which under the presidency of Vincent d'Indy had become a reactionary organisation. They formed a new group, the Société Musicale Indépendante, of which Fauré accepted the presidency. He also remained a member of the older society and continued to be on the best of terms with d'Indy; his sole concern was the fostering of new music. In 1911 he oversaw the Conservatoire's move to new premises in the rue de Madrid. During this time, Fauré developed ear trouble and gradually lost his hearing. Sound not only became fainter, but it was also distorted, so that pitches on the low and high ends of his audible range sounded like other pitches. He made efforts to conceal his difficulty but was eventually forced to abandon his teaching position.
In the early years of the century, Fauré's music began to gain a foothold in Britain, and to a lesser extent in Germany, Spain and Russia. He was a frequent visitor to England, and he was invited to play at Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace, in London, is the principal residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality...
in 1908, which opened many doors for him in London and beyond. He attended the London premiere of Elgar
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...
's First Symphony
Symphony No. 1 (Elgar)
Sir Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55 is one of his two completed symphonies. The first performance was given by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Hans Richter in Manchester, England, on 3 December 1908. It was widely known that Elgar had been planning a symphony for more than...
in 1908, and dined with Elgar afterwards. Elgar later wrote to their mutual friend Frank Schuster
Leo Frank Schuster
Leo Frank Schuster , was a patron of the arts in the United Kingdom, normally known to his friends as "Frankie". His home at 22 Old Queen Street, London, became a meeting-place for artists, writers and musicians, including Siegfried Sassoon, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Sir Edward Elgar...
that Fauré "was such a real gentleman – the highest kind of Frenchman and I admired him greatly." Elgar tried to get Fauré's Requiem
Requiem (Fauré)
Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in D minor, Op. 48 between 1887 and 1890. This choral–orchestral setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead is the best known of his large works. The most famous movement is the soprano aria Pie Jesu...
put on at the Three Choirs Festival
Three Choirs Festival
The Three Choirs Festival is a music festival held each August alternately at the cathedrals of the Three Counties and originally featuring their three choirs, which remain central to the week-long programme...
, but it did not finally have its English premiere until 1937, nearly fifty years after its first performance in France. Composers from other countries also loved and admired Fauré. Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский ; often "Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky" in English. His names are also transliterated "Piotr" or "Petr"; "Ilitsch", "Il'ich" or "Illyich"; and "Tschaikowski", "Tschaikowsky", "Chajkovskij"...
had thought him "adorable", Albéniz
Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish Catalan pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms .-Life:Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz...
and Fauré were friends and correspondents for many years, Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
sought his advice, and in Fauré's last years, the young Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
was a devoted admirer.
The outbreak of World War I almost stranded Fauré in Germany, where he had gone for his annual composing retreat. He managed to get from Germany into Switzerland, and thence to Paris. He remained in France for the duration of the war. When a group of French musicians led by Saint-Saëns tried to organise a boycott of German music, Fauré and Messager dissociated themselves from the idea, though the disagreement did not affect their friendship with Saint-Saëns. Fauré did not recognise nationalism in music, seeing in his art "a language belonging to a country so far above all others that it is dragged down when it has to express feelings or individual traits that belong to any particular nation." Nevertheless, he was aware that his own music was respected rather than loved in Germany. In January 1905, visiting Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
and Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
for concerts of his music, he had written: "The criticisms of my music have been that it's a bit cold and too well brought up! There's no question about it, French and German are two different things."
Last years and legacy
In 1920, at the age of 75, Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. In that year, he received the Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneurLégion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
, an honour rare for a musician. In 1922 there was a public tribute paid to him in a national hommage, "a splendid celebration at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
, in which the most illustrious French artists participated, brought him great joy. It was a poignant spectacle, indeed: that of a man present at a concert of his own works and able to hear not a single note. He sat gazing before him pensively, and, in spite of everything, grateful and content."
In his last years, Fauré suffered from poor health, partly brought on by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les six
Les Six
Les six is a name, inspired by The Five, given in 1920 by critic Henri Collet in an article titled "" to a group of six composers working in Montparnasse whose music is often seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner and impressionist music.-Members:Formally, the Groupe des...
, who were devoted to him. Nectoux writes: "In old age he attained a kind of serenity, without losing any of his remarkable spiritual vitality, but rather removed from the sensualism and the passion of the works he wrote between 1875 and 1895."
Fauré died in Paris from pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...
on 4 November 1924 at the age of 79. He was given a state funeral at the Église de la Madeleine and is buried in the Passy Cemetery
Passy Cemetery
The Passy Cemetery is a famous cemetery located at 2, rue du Commandant Schlœsing in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France.-History:...
in Paris.
After Fauré's death, the Conservatoire reverted to its former conservatism, with his own harmonic practice being held up as the farthest limit of modernity, beyond which students should not go. The generation of students born between the wars rejected this outdated premise, turning instead to Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
, the Second Viennese School and the latest works of Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
.
In a centenary tribute, the musicologist Leslie Orrey wrote in The Musical Times
The Musical Times
The Musical Times is an academic journal of classical music edited and produced in the United Kingdom. It is currently the oldest such journal that is still publishing in the UK, having been published continuously since 1844. It was published as The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular until...
: "'More profound than Saint-Saëns, more varied than Lalo
Édouard Lalo
Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer.-Biography:Lalo was born in Lille , in northernmost France. He attended that city's music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berlioz's old enemy François Antoine Habeneck...
, more spontaneous than d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
, more classic than Debussy, Gabriel Fauré is the master par excellence of French music, the perfect mirror of our musical genius.' Perhaps, when English musicians get to know his work better, these words of Roger-Ducasse
Jean Roger-Ducasse
Jean Jules Amable Roger-Ducasse was a French composer.-Biography:Jean Roger-Ducasse studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Emile Pessard and André Gedalge, and was the star pupil and close friend of Gabriel Fauré...
will seem, not over-praise, but no more than his due."
Music
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
wrote that although Fauré's works can be divided into the usual three periods, there is no such radical difference between his first and last manners as is evident with many other composers. Copland found premonitions of Fauré's last manner in even his earliest works, and traces of the early Fauré in the works of his old age: "The themes, harmonies, form, have remained essentially the same, but with each new work they have all become more fresh, more personal, more profound."
Influences on Fauré, particularly in his early work, included Mozart, Chopin and Schumann. The authors of The Record Guide
The Record Guide
The Record Guide was an English reference work, listing, describing and evaluating gramophone recordings of classical music in the 1950s. It was the precursor of modern guides such as The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music-Publication history:...
(1955) wrote that Fauré learnt restraint and beauty of surface from Mozart, tonal freedom and long melodic lines from Chopin, "and from Schumann, the sudden felicities in which his development sections abound, and those codas in which whole movements are briefly but magically illuminated." His work was based on the strong understanding of harmonic structures that he gained at the École Niedermeyer
Louis Niedermeyer
Abraham Louis Niedermeyer was a composer chiefly of church music but also of a few operas, and a teacher who took over the Ecole Choron, duly renamed École Niedermeyer, a school for the study and practice of church music, where several eminent French musicians studied including Gabriel Fauré and...
from Niedermeyer's successor Gustave Lefèvre. Lefèvre wrote the book Traité d'harmonie (Paris, 1889), in which he sets out a harmonic theory that differs significantly from the classical theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François...
, no longer outlawing certain chords as "dissonant
Consonance and dissonance
In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...
". By using unresolved mild discords and colouristic effects, Fauré anticipated the techniques of Impressionist
Impressionist music
Impressionism in music was a tendency in European classical music, mainly in France, which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere...
composers.
In contrast with his harmonic and melodic style, which pushed the bounds for his time, Fauré's rhythmic motives tended to be subtle and repetitive, with little to break the flow of the line, although he used discreet syncopations, similar to those found in Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
's works. Copland referred to him as "the Brahms of France". Jerry Dubins posited in 2007 in Fanfare Magazine
Fanfare Magazine
Fanfare is a magazine devoted to reviewing classical music performance and recordings.Fanfare's contributors have a range of expertise from the medieval to contemporary work...
that Fauré is the "missing link" between Brahms and Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
.
To Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, Fauré's later works do not display the easy charm of his earlier music: "the luscious romantic harmony which had always been firmly supported by a single tonality, later gave way to a severely monochrome style, full of enharmonic shifts, and creating the impression of several tonal centres simultaneously employed."
Vocal music
Fauré is regarded as one of the masters of the French art song, or mélodieMélodie
Mélodie refers to French art songs of the mid-19th century to the present; it is the French equivalent of the German Lied. It is distinguished from a chanson, which is a folk or popular song.-Nature of the mélodie:...
. In Copland's view, the early songs were written under the influence of Gounod
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...
, and except for isolated songs such as "Après un rêve" or "Au bord de l'eau" there is little sign of the artist to come. With the second volume of the sixty collected songs, Copland judged, came the first mature examples of "the real Fauré". He instanced "Les berceaux", "Les roses d'Ispahan" and especially "Clair de lune
Clair de lune (Fauré)
"Clair de lune", Op. 46 No 2, is a song by Gabriel Fauré, composed in 1887 to words by Paul Verlaine. The pianist Graham Johnson writes that it closes Fauré's second period and opens the doors into his third. Johnson notes that it is "for many people the quintessential French mélodie".The lyric is...
" as "so beautiful, so perfect, that they have even penetrated to America", and drew attention to less well known mélodies such as "Le secret", "Nocturne", and "Les présents". Fauré also composed a number of song cycle
Song cycle
A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...
s. Cinq mélodies "de Venise"
Cinq mélodies "de Venise"
Cinq mélodies "de Venise", Op. 58, is a song cycle by Gabriel Fauré, of five mélodies for voice and piano. Composed in 1891, the cycle is based on five poems by Paul Verlaine, from the collections Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles. According to Fauré himself, the song cycle contains a...
, Op. 58, was described by Fauré as a novel kind of song suite
Suite
In music, a suite is an ordered set of instrumental or orchestral pieces normally performed in a concert setting rather than as accompaniment; they may be extracts from an opera, ballet , or incidental music to a play or film , or they may be entirely original movements .In the...
, in its use of musical themes
Theme (music)
In music, a theme is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based.-Characteristics:A theme may be perceivable as a complete musical expression in itself, separate from the work in which it is found . In contrast to an idea or motif, a theme is...
recurring over the cycle. For the later cycle La bonne chanson
La bonne chanson (Fauré)
La bonne chanson, Op. 61, by Gabriel Fauré, is a song cycle of nine mélodies for voice and piano. He composed it during 1892–94; in 1898 he created a version for voice, piano and string quintet. The cycle is based on nine of the poems from the collection of the same name by Paul Verlaine...
, Op. 61, there were five such themes, according to Fauré. He also wrote that La bonne chanson was his most spontaneous composition, with Emma Bardac singing back to him each day's newly written material.
The Requiem
Requiem (Fauré)
Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in D minor, Op. 48 between 1887 and 1890. This choral–orchestral setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead is the best known of his large works. The most famous movement is the soprano aria Pie Jesu...
, Op. 48, was not composed to the memory of a specific person but, in Fauré's words, "for the pleasure of it." It was first performed in 1888. It has been described as "a lullaby of death" because of its predominantly gentle tone. Fauré omitted the Dies Irae
Dies Irae
Dies Irae is a thirteenth century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano . It is a medieval Latin poem characterized by its accentual stress and its rhymed lines. The metre is trochaic...
, though reference to the day of judgment appears in the Libera me, which, like Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
, he added to the normal liturgical text. Fauré revised the Requiem over the years, and a number of different performing versions are now in use, from the earliest, for small forces, to the final revision with full orchestra.
Fauré's operas have not found a place in the regular repertoire. Copland called Pénélope
Pénélope
Pénélope is an opera in three acts by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. The libretto, by René Fauchois, is based on Homer's Odyssey. It was first performed at the Salle Garnier, Monte Carlo on 4 March 1913.-Background and performance history:...
a fascinating work, and one of the best operas written since Wagner. He noted, however, that the music is, as a whole, "distinctly non-theatrical." The work uses leitmotif
Leitmotif
A leitmotif , sometimes written leit-motif, is a musical term , referring to a recurring theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical idea of idée fixe...
s, and the two main roles call for voices of heroic quality, but these are the only ways in which the work is Wagnerian. In Fauré's late style, "tonality is stretched hard, without breaking."
Piano works
In his piano works, Fauré shunned virtuosity in favour of the classical lucidity of the French. His piano works often use arpeggiatedArpeggio
An arpeggio is a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously...
figures, with the melody interspersed between the two hands, and include finger substitutions natural for organists. These aspects make them daunting for some pianists, and even a virtuoso like Liszt found Fauré's piano music hard to play. The early piano works are clearly influenced by Chopin. An even greater influence was Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
, whose piano music Fauré loved more than any other. With the sixth Nocturne, Fauré fully emerged from any predecessor's shadow. The pianist Alfred Cortot
Alfred Cortot
Alfred Denis Cortot was a Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor. He is one of the most renowned 20th-century classical musicians, especially valued for his poetic insight in Romantic period piano works, particularly those of Chopin and Schumann.-Early life and education:Born in Nyon, Vaud, in the...
said, "There are few pages in all music comparable to these." The critic Bryce Morrison has noted that pianists frequently prefer to play the charming earlier piano works, such as the Impromptu No. 2, rather than the later piano works, which express "such private passion and isolation, such alternating anger and resignation" that listeners are left uneasy. Fauré was unimpressed by purely virtuoso pianists, saying, "the greater they are, the worse they play me."
Fauré wrote the Dolly Suite
Dolly (Fauré)
The Dolly Suite, Op. 56, is a collection of pieces for piano four-hands by Gabriel Fauré. It consists of short pieces written or revised between 1893 and 1896, to mark the birthdays and other events in the life of the daughter of the composer's mistress....
for piano four-hands
Piano four-hands
Piano four hands is a specific form of duet for a single piano with two players. A duet with the players playing separate instruments is a piano duo....
between 1894 and 1897 and dedicated it to Hélène, daughter of Emma Bardac.
Orchestral and chamber works
Fauré was not greatly interested in orchestration, frequently inviting his former students such as Jean Roger-DucasseJean Roger-Ducasse
Jean Jules Amable Roger-Ducasse was a French composer.-Biography:Jean Roger-Ducasse studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Emile Pessard and André Gedalge, and was the star pupil and close friend of Gabriel Fauré...
and Charles Koechlin
Charles Koechlin
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars , travelling, stereoscopic...
to orchestrate his concert and theatre works. His generally sober orchestral style reflects a definite aesthetic attitude. He was not attracted by striking combinations of tone-colours, which he thought were too often a form of self-indulgence and a disguise for the absence of ideas. In Nectoux's words, "The idea of timbre was not a determining one in Fauré's musical thinking". His best-known orchestral works are the orchestral suite Masques et bergamasques (based on music for a dramatic entertainment, or divertissement comique), and music for Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas et Mélisande (Fauré)
Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80 is a suite derived from incidental music by Gabriel Fauré for Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name. He was the first of four leading composers to write music inspired by Maeterlinck's drama...
.
In the chamber
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
repertoire, his two piano quartet
Piano quartet
In European classical music, piano quartet denotes a chamber music composition for piano and three other instruments, or a musical ensemble comprising such instruments...
s, particularly the first, are among Fauré's better-known works. His other chamber music includes two piano quintet
Piano quintet
In European classical music, a piano quintet is a work of chamber music written for piano and four other instruments, most commonly piano, two violins, viola, and cello . Among the most frequently performed piano quintets are those by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, César Franck, Antonín Dvořák...
s, two cello sonata
Cello sonata
A cello sonata is usually a sonata written for cello and piano, though other instrumentations are used, such as solo cello. The most famous Romantic-era cellos sonatas are those written by Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven...
s, two violin sonata
Violin sonata
A violin sonata is a musical composition for violin, which is nearly always accompanied by a piano or other keyboard instrument, or by figured bass in the Baroque period.-A:*Ella Adayevskaya**Sonata Greca for Violin or Clarinet and Piano...
s, a piano trio
Piano trio
A piano trio is a group of piano and two other instruments, usually a violin and a cello, or a piece of music written for such a group. It is one of the most common forms found in classical chamber music...
and a string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
. Copland (writing in 1924 before the string quartet was finished) held the second quintet to be Fauré's masterpiece: "... a pure well of spirituality ... extremely classic, as far removed as possible from the romantic temperament." Other critics have taken a less favourable view: "The ceaseless flow and restricted colour scheme of Fauré's last manner, as exemplified in this Quintet, need very careful management, if they are not to become tedious." Fauré's last work, the String Quartet
String Quartet (Fauré)
Gabriel Faure's String Quartet in E minor, Op 121, is his last work, completed in 1924 shortly before his death at the age of 79. His pupil Maurice Ravel had dedicated his String Quartet to Fauré in 1903, and he and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own; he declined, on the grounds that it...
, has been described as an intimate meditation on the last things, and "an extraordinary work by any standards, ethereal and other-worldly with themes that seem constantly to be drawn skywards."
Recordings
Fauré made piano rolls of his music for several companies between 1905 and 1913. In the 1920s a few of Fauré's more popular songs were recorded, including "Après un rêve" sung by Olga Haley, and "Automne" and "Clair de lune" sung by Ninon VallinNinon Vallin
Ninon Vallin was a French soprano who achieved considerable popularity in opera, operetta and classical song recitals during an international career which lasted for more than four decades. [Note: Vallin's birthday is sometimes given as September 7 or September 9.]-Career:Ninon Vallin was born...
. In the 1930s better-known performers recorded Fauré pieces, including Georges Thill
Georges Thill
Georges Thill was a French opera singer, often considered to be his country's greatest lyric-dramatic tenor...
("En prière"), and Jacques Thibaud
Jacques Thibaud
Jacques Thibaud was a French violinist.Thibaud was born in Bordeaux and studied the violin with his father before entering the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. In 1896 he jointly won the conservatory's violin prize with Pierre Monteux...
and Alfred Cortot
Alfred Cortot
Alfred Denis Cortot was a Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor. He is one of the most renowned 20th-century classical musicians, especially valued for his poetic insight in Romantic period piano works, particularly those of Chopin and Schumann.-Early life and education:Born in Nyon, Vaud, in the...
(Violin Sonata No. 1 and Berceuse). Some of the orchestral music for Pelléas et Mélisande was recorded in 1938.
By the 1940s there were a few more Fauré works in the catalogues. A survey by John Culshaw
John Culshaw
John Royds Culshaw OBE was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He recorded a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958.Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for...
in December 1945 singled out recordings of piano works played by Kathleen Long
Kathleen Long
Kathleen Long CBE was a British pianist and teacher. She was an awarded soloist, but was also a much appreciated chamber music player and recitalist. Her tours included Europe, North America and South Africa....
(including the Nocturne No. 6, Barcarolle No. 2, the Thème et Variations, Op. 73, and the Ballade Op. 19 in its orchestral version conducted by Boyd Neel
Boyd Neel
Louis Boyd Neel was an English conductor and academic. He is perhaps best known for revitalizing the genre of the chamber orchestra.-Early years:...
), the Requiem conducted by Ernest Bourmauck, and seven songs sung by Maggie Teyte
Maggie Teyte
Dame Maggie Teyte DBE was an English operatic soprano and interpreter of French art song.-Early years:Margaret Tate was born in Wolverhampton, England, one of ten children of Jacob James Tate, a successful wine and spirit merchant and proprietor of public houses and later lodgings. Her parents...
. Fauré's music began to appear more frequently in the record companies' releases in the 1950s. The Record Guide
The Record Guide
The Record Guide was an English reference work, listing, describing and evaluating gramophone recordings of classical music in the 1950s. It was the precursor of modern guides such as The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music-Publication history:...
, 1955, listed the Piano Quartet No. 1, Piano Quintet No. 2, the String Quartet, both Violin Sonatas, the Cello Sonata No. 2, two new recordings of the Requiem, and the complete song cycles La bonne chanson and La chanson d'Ève.
In the LP and particularly the CD era, the record companies have built up a substantial catalogue of Fauré's music, performed by French and non-French musicians. Sets of his major orchestral works have been recorded under conductors including Michel Plasson
Michel Plasson
Michel Plasson is a French conductor.Plasson was a student of Lazare Lévy at the Conservatoire de Paris. In 1962, he was a prize-winner at the International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors. He studied briefly in the United States, including time with Charles Münch...
(1981) and Yan Pascal Tortelier
Yan Pascal Tortelier
Yan Pascal Tortelier is an internationally renowned French conductor and violinist and is the son of the late cellist Paul Tortelier.-Biography:...
(1996). Fauré's main chamber works have all been recorded, with players including the Ysaÿe Quartet, Domus
Domus
In ancient Rome, the domus was the type of house occupied by the upper classes and some wealthy freedmen during the Republican and Imperial eras. They could be found in almost all the major cities throughout the Roman territories...
, Paul Tortelier
Paul Tortelier
Paul Tortelier was a French cellist and composer.Tortelier was born in Paris, the son of a cabinet maker with Breton roots. He was encouraged to play the cello by his father Joseph and mother Marguerite , and at 12 he entered the Paris Conservatoire. He studied the cello there with Gérard Hekking...
, Arthur Grumiaux
Arthur Grumiaux
Arthur Grumiaux was a Belgian violinist who was also proficient in piano.-Youth:Grumiaux was born in Villers-Perwin, Belgium to a working-class family, and it was his grandfather who urged him to begin music studies at the age of only 4...
, and Joshua Bell
Joshua Bell
Joshua David Bell is an American Grammy Award-winning violinist.-Childhood:Bell was born in Bloomington, Indiana, United States, the son of a psychologist and a therapist. Bell's father is the late Alan P...
. The complete piano works have been recorded by Kathryn Stott
Kathryn Stott
Kathryn Stott is a British classical pianist who performs as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. Her specialities include the English and French classical repertoire, contemporary classical music and the tango...
(1995), and Paul Crossley
Paul Crossley
Paul Crossley is a British pianist.Born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, his piano teacher was Fanny Waterman in Leeds. While a student at Mansfield College, Oxford, he was discovered by Olivier Messiaen and his wife Yvonne Loriod, who heard him play and immediately invited him to come to Paris to study...
(1984–85), with substantial sets of the major piano works from Jean-Philippe Collard
Jean-Philippe Collard
Jean-Philippe Collard is a renowned French pianist who is known for his interpretations of the works of Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns.Born into a musical family, he started playing the piano at age five...
(1982–84), Pascal Rogé
Pascal Rogé
Pascal Rogé is a French pianist. His playing includes the works of compatriot composers Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Poulenc, among others. However, his repertoire also covers the German masters Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven.- Biography :Rogé first appeared in public in...
(1990), and Kun-Woo Paik
Kun-Woo Paik
Kun-woo Paik is a South Korean pianist.-Early life:Kun Woo Paik was born in Seoul. he gave his first concert, aged 10, with the Korean National Orchestra . In the following years he performed many important works in Korea, including several premieres such as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition...
(2002). Fauré's songs have all been recorded for CD, including a complete set (2005), anchored by the accompanist Graham Johnson, with soloists Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Jean-Paul Fouchécourt is a French tenor, mostly as an opera singer. He was born on August 30, 1958, at Blanzy in the Burgundy region. He is best known for singing French Baroque music, especially the parts called in French haute-contre, written for a very high tenor voice with no falsetto...
, Felicity Lott
Felicity Lott
Dame Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott, DBE, FRCM is an English soprano.-Education:From her earliest years she was musical, having started studying piano at age 5. She also played violin and began singing lessons at 12. She is an alumna of Royal Holloway, University of London, obtaining a BA in French and...
, John Mark Ainsley
John Mark Ainsley
John Mark Ainsley is an English lyric tenor. Known for his supple voice, Ainsley is particularly admired for his interpretations of baroque music and the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...
and Jennifer Smith, among others. The Requiem and the shorter choral works are also well-represented on disc. Pénélope
Pénélope
Pénélope is an opera in three acts by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. The libretto, by René Fauchois, is based on Homer's Odyssey. It was first performed at the Salle Garnier, Monte Carlo on 4 March 1913.-Background and performance history:...
has been recorded twice, with casts headed by Régine Crespin
Régine Crespin
Régine Crespin was a French singer who had a major international career in opera and on the concert stage between 1950 and 1989. She started her career singing roles in the dramatic soprano and spinto soprano repertoire, drawing particular acclaim singing Wagner and Strauss heroines...
in 1956, and Jessye Norman
Jessye Norman
Jessye Norman is an American opera singer. Norman is a well-known contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is one of the highest paid performers in classical music...
in 1981, conducted respectively by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht
Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht
Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht was a French composer, conductor and writer.- Life and career :Inghelbrecht was born in Paris, the son of a viola-player. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire and made his debut as a conductor in 1908 at the Théâtre des Arts.Inghelbrecht entered the Conservatoire aged 7...
and Charles Dutoit
Charles Dutoit
Charles Édouard Dutoit, is a Swiss conductor, particularly noted for his interpretations of French and Russian 20th century music...
. Prométhée has not been recorded in full, but extensive excerpts were recorded under Roger Norrington
Roger Norrington
Sir Roger Arthur Carver Norrington, CBE is a British conductor. He is the son of Sir Arthur Norrington and his brother is Humphrey Thomas Norrington....
(1980).
Modern assessment
A 2001 article on Fauré in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of MusiciansBaker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians is a biographical dictionary of musicians.The first edition of Baker's, under the title A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, was published in 1900 by Theodore Baker; it has since gone through nine editions.The 5th edition of 1958, 8th edition of 1992,...
concludes thus:
Fauré's biographer, Nectoux, writes in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is the largest single reference work on Western music. The dictionary has gone through several editions since the 19th century...
, that Fauré is widely regarded as the greatest master of French song, and that alongside the songs the chamber works rank as "Fauré's most important contribution to music". The critic Robert Orledge writes, "His genius was one of synthesis: he reconciled such opposing elements as modality and tonality, anguish and serenity, seduction and force within a single non-eclectic style, as in the Pelléas et Mélisande suite, his symphonic masterpiece. The quality of constant renewal within an apparently limited range … is a remarkable facet of his genius, and the spare, elliptical style of his single String Quartet suggests that his intensely self-disciplined style was still developing at the time of his death."
Sources
- Anderson, Robert (1993). Elgar. London: J M Dent. ISBN 0-460-86054-2
- Holden, Amanda (ed.) (1997). The Penguin Opera Guide. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-051385-X
- Jones, J Barrie (1989). Gabriel Fauré – A Life in Letters. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd. ISBN 0-7134-5468-7
- March, Ivan (ed.) (2007). The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2008. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-141-0336-5
- Moore, Jerrold Northrop. (1987) Elgar – A Creative Life. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 0-1928-4014-2
- Nectoux, Jean-Michel, trans. J.A. Underwood (1984). Gabriel Fauré – His Life Through Letters. London: Boyars. ISBN 0-7145-2768-8
- Nectoux, Jean-Michel, trans. Roger Nichols (1991). Gabriel Fauré – A Musical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23524-3
- Nichols, Roger (1987). Ravel Remembered. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-14986-3
- Orledge, Robert (1979). Gabriel Fauré. London: Eulenburg Books. ISBN 0-903873-40-0
- Rosen, David (1995), Verdi: Requiem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39767-7
- Sackville-West, Edward, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1956). The Record Guide. London: Collins.
- Wagstaff, John (1991). André Messager: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-25736-1
- Vallas, Léon, trans. Hubert FossHubert J. FossHubert James Foss was an English pianist, composer, and first Musical Editor for Oxford University Press at Amen House in London. His work at the Press was a major factor in promoting music and musicians in England between the world wars, most notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, through publishing...
(1951). César Franck, London: Harrap, 1951.
External links
- Gabriel Fauré MIDI files Kunst der Fuge site
- Free scores at the Mutopia ProjectMutopia projectThe Mutopia Project is a volunteer-run effort to create a library of free content sheet music, in a way similar to Project Gutenberg's library of public domain books.The music is reproduced from old scores that are out of copyright...
- "The Master of Charms" – a series of short articles about Fauré's music on AdventuresInMusic.biz
- Oeuvres complètes pour orgue / J.S. Bach : révision par Gabriel Fauré. From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
- Piano Rolls (The Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation)
- Septuor pour trompette, deux violons, alto, violoncelle, contre-basse et piano, op. 65 par C. Saint-Saëns, à 4 mains par G. Fauré. From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
- Fauré Complete Works Spotify Playlist