A student of Saint-Saëns and a teacher of Ravel, French composer Gabriel Fauré was one of the most influential musical figures of his generation. His life spanned the late-Romantic and early Modern eras, and his enduring compositions include art songs, piano pieces, chamber music works, and a requiem.
Early YearsFauré was born in Pamiers, in southern France, on May 12, 1845. The youngest of six children, he was the only one of his siblings to demonstrate musical ability. In 1854, at the age of nine, Fauré enrolled in the Paris-based École de Musique Classique et Religieuse — also known as the École Niedermeyer, in honor of the school’s founder, Louis Niedermeyer — where he studied to become a church organist and choirmaster. His teachers included Camille Saint-Saëns, who, after Niedermeyer’s death in 1861, introduced students to contemporary music by the likes of Wagner, Liszt, and Schumann. Fauré once said that, during his school years, he developed an “almost filial attachment” to Saint-Saëns as well as an “immense admiration” and “unceasing gratitude” that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Church OrganistFauré earned his diploma from the École Niedermeyer in 1865, and in January 1866 he became the organist at the Church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes. He was asked to resign in 1870, however, due to his seemingly rebellious behavior, and Saint-Saëns helped him secure a position as an assistant organist at the church of Notre-Dame de Clignancourt in Paris. A few months later, Fauré volunteered to fight in the Franco-Prussian War and eventually earned a Croix de Guerre for his service.
Following France’s defeat in the war, Fauré headed to Switzerland, where he taught at his temporarily relocated alma mater, the École Niedermeyer. He returned to Paris in October 1871 — the same year he became a founding member of the Société Nationale de Musique, which presented new works by French composers — and served as choirmaster at the Église Saint-Sulpice under organist Charles-Marie Widor. In 1874, Fauré became deputy organist at the Église de la Madeleine under Saint-Saëns, and three years later he became choirmaster when Saint-Saëns retired and the then-choirmaster, Théodore Dubois, succeeded him as organist. Fauré succeeded Dubois as organist in 1896 and held that position until 1905.
Composer and TeacherThroughout his career, Fauré supported his family — which included his wife, Marie Fremiet, and sons Emmanuel and Philippe — primarily by working as an organist, a private piano teacher, and, later, professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Composing provided relatively little income, since his publisher paid him an outright fee rather than royalties, and, in general, Fauré’s music didn’t gain international attention until the early 20th century.
Fauré wrote one of his earliest works to enter the repertoire, Cantique de Jean Racine, in 1865, while he was a student at the École Niedermeyer. The work, which Fauré later revised, won first prize in the school’s composition competition and was originally scored for mixed choir and organ. It wasn’t until roughly a decade later, however, that Fauré began to make his mark as a composer, thanks to the successful premiere of his Violin Sonata No. 1 in Paris in January 1877. After the premiere, Saint-Saëns said:
In this sonata you can find everything to tempt a gourmet: new forms, excellent modulations, unusual tone colors, and the use of unexpected rhythms. A magic floats above everything, encompassing the whole work, causing the crowd of usual listeners to accept the unimagined audacity as something quite normal. With this work Monsieur Fauré takes his place among the masters.
Throughout the 1880s, Fauré wrote or premiered a handful of his best-known works, including his Piano Quartet No. 1, “Clair de lune” (the song is set to text by the French poet Paul Verlaine), Pavane, and Requiem (in its original version). Later works include his Dolly Suite, written for piano four-hands between 1893 and 1896 and dedicated to the daughter of his mistress; the Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, which features incidental music Fauré wrote for an 1898 production of the Maurice Maeterlinck play of the same name; and the orchestral suite Masques et Bergamasques, which was commissioned by Prince Albert I of Monaco, at the suggestion of Saint-Saëns, and premiered at the Monte Carlo Theater in 1919.
Fauré’s career took another significant turn in 1892, when, with Saint-Saëns’s encouragement, he applied for the position of composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire following the death of Ernest Guiraud. The director of the conservatory, Ambroise Thomas, rejected Fauré’s appointment, since he felt his work was too modern, and Fauré wound up taking over another of Guiraud’s positions — inspector of the music conservatories in the French provinces — instead. Fauré became a professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1896, following the resignation of Jules Massenet, who expected to be named director following Thomas’s death that same year but was passed over for Théodore Dubois. Nine years later, in 1905, Fauré became director when Dubois retired early, after his presumed heir, Charles Lenepveu, was involved in a national scandal while judging France’s most prestigious award for young composers, the Prix de Rome.
During his time at the Paris Conservatoire, Fauré taught important composers such as Georges Enesco, Nadia Boulanger, and, most famously, Maurice Ravel. As the school’s director, he initiated changes to the curriculum, administration, and admissions process, which caused some conservative faculty members to resign in protest.
Final Years and LegacyIn 1920, Fauré retired from the Paris Conservatoire due to declining health and increasing deafness; that same year he was awarded the Grand-croix of the Légion d’honneur. Fauré died on November 4, 1924, in Paris, at the age of 79, and was given a state funeral at one of his former places of employment, the Église de la Madeleine.
Over the past century, Fauré’s works have earned a prominent place within the classical music repertoire. When considering Fauré’s legacy, composer Jean Roger-Ducasse, one of Fauré’s former students, said: “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.” Musicologist Robert Orledge, writing in The Oxford Companion to Music, noted that:
[Fauré’s] 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 …. The quality of constant renewal within an apparently limited range … is a remarkable facet of his genius ….
Fauré at the FestivalOn August 5 and August 6, at 6 p.m. in the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Festival presents Fauré’s masterful Piano Quartet No. 1, which premiered in Paris, with Fauré at the piano, in February 1880. The Festival’s performance features pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, violist Manabu Suzuki, cellist Eric Kim, and 2018 Artist-in-Residence Alan Gilbert (see Musician Spotlight) on the violin.