Head of Paris Conservatoire |
| In 1905 a scandal erupted in French musical circles over the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome. Gabriel Fauré's pupil, Maurice Ravel, had been eliminated prematurely in his 6th attempt for this award, and many believed that reactionary elements within the Conservatoire had played a part in it. Dubois, who became the subject of much censure, announced his retirement and stepped down at once. Appointed in his place, and with the support of the French government, Fauré radically changed the administration and curriculum. He appointed independent external judges to decide on admissions, examinations and competitions, a move which enraged faculty members who had given preferential treatment to their private pupils; feeling themselves deprived of a considerable extra income, many of them resigned. Fauré was dubbed "Robespierre" by disaffected members of the old guard as 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 curriculum was broadened to range from Renaissance polyphony to the works of Debussy.Gabriel Fauré's new position left him better off financially. However, while he also became much more widely known as a composer, running the Conservatoire left him with no more time for composition than when he was struggling to earn 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 a hotel, usually by one of the Swiss lakes, to concentrate on composition. His works from this period include his lyric opera, Pénélope (1913), and some of his most characteristic later songs (e.g., the cycle La chanson d'Ève, Op. 95, completed in 1910) and piano pieces (Nocturnes Nos. 9-11; Barcarolles Nos. 7-11, written between 1906 and 1914).Gabriel Fauré was elected to the Institut de France in 1909, after his father-in-law and Camille Saint-Saëns, both long-established members, had canvassed strongly on his behalf. He won the ballot by a narrow margin, 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, and formed a new group, the Société Musicale Indépendante. While Fauré accepted the presidency of this society, he also remained a member of the older one and continued 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 serious problems with his hearing. Not only did he start to go deaf, but sounds became distorted, so that high and low notes sounded painfully out of tune to him.The turn of the 20th century saw a rise in the popularity of Gabriel Fauré's music in Britain, and to a lesser extent in Germany, Spain and Russia. He visited England frequently, and an invitation to play at Buckingham Palace in 1908 opened many other doors in London and beyond. He attended the London premiere of Edward Elgar's First Symphony, in 1908, and dined with the composer afterwards. Edward 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." Edward 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. In the 1880s Tchaikovsky had thought him "adorable"; Albéniz and Fauré were friends and correspondents until the former's early death in 1909; Richard Strauss sought his advice; and in Fauré's last years, the young American, AarCopland was a devoted admirer.The outbreak of World War I almost stranded Gabriel 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 Camille 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 Camille 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." Nonetheless, 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." |
Last years and legacy |
| In 1920, at the age of 75, Gabriel Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. In that year he received the Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneur, an honour rare for a musician. In 1922 the president of the republic, Alexandre Millerand, led a public tribute to Fauré, a national hommage, described in The Musical Times as "a splendid celebration at the Sorbonne, in which the most illustrious French artists participated, [which] 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."Gabriel Fauré suffered from poor health in his later years, brought on in part by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les Six, most of whom 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."In his last months, Gabriel Fauré struggled to complete a string quartet. Twenty years earlier he had been the dedicatee of Ravel's String Quartet. Ravel and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own. He refused for many years, on the grounds that it was too difficult. When he finally decided to write it, he did so in trepidation, telling his wife, "I've started a Quartet for strings, without piano. This is a genre which L.v. Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes all those who are not L.v. Beethoven to be terrified of it." He worked on the piece for a year, finishing it on September 11, 1924, less than two months before he died, working long hours towards the end to complete it. The quartet was premiered after his death; he declined an offer to have it performed privately for him in his last days, as his hearing had deteriorated to the point where musical sounds were horribly distorted in his ear.Gabriel Fauré died in Paris from pneumonia on November 4, 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 Gabriel Fauré's death, the Conservatoire abandoned his radicalism and became resistant to new trends in music, with Fauré's own harmonic practice being held up as the farthest limit of modernity, beyond which students should not go. His successor, Henri Rabaud, director of the Conservatoire from 1922 to 1941, declared "modernism is the enemy". The generation of students born between the wars rejected this outdated premise, turning for inspiration to Bartók, the Second Viennese School, and the latest works of Igor Stravinsky.In a centenary tribute in 1945, 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." |
| Music |
| See: List of compositions by Gabriel Fauré (Wikipedia) |
| Aaron Copland wrote that although Gabriel Fauré's works can be divided into the usual "early", "middle" and "late" periods, there is no such radical difference between his first and last manners as is evident with many other composers. Copland found premonitions of late Fauré in even the 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." When Fauré was born, Berlioz and F. Chopin were still composing; the latter was among his early influences. In his later years Fauré developed compositional techniques that foreshadowed the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg, and, later still, drew discreetly on the techniques of jazz. Duchen writes that early works such as the Cantique de Jean Racine are in the tradition of French 19th-century romanticism, yet his late works are as modern as any of the works of his pupils.Influences on Gabriel Fauré, particularly in his early work, included not only F. Chopin but W.A. Mozart and Robert Schumann. The authors of The Record Guide (1955), Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, wrote that Fauré learnt restraint and beauty of surface from W.A. Mozart, tonal freedom and long melodic lines from F. 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 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, Gabriel 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 Johannes Brahms's works. Copland referred to him as "the Brahms of France". The music critic Jerry Dubins suggests that Fauré "represents the link between the late German Romanticism of Brahms ... and the French Impressionism of Debussy."To Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, Gabriel 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 |
| Gabriel Fauré is regarded as one of the masters of the Fart song, or mélodie. Ravel wrote in 1922 that Fauré had saved French music from the dominance of the German Lied. Two years later the critic Samuel Langford wrote of Fauré: "More surely almost than any writer in the world he commanded the faculty to create a song all of a piece, and with a sustained intensity of mood which made it like a single thought". In a 2011 article the pianist and writer Roy Howat and the musicologist Emily Kilpatrick wrote: “His devotion to the mélodie spans his career, from the ever-fresh "Le papillon et la fleur" of 1861 to the masterly cycle L'horizon chimérique, composed sixty years and more than a hundred songs later. Fauré's songs are now core repertoire for students and professionals, sung in conservatories and recital halls throughout the world.”In Copland's view the early songs were written in the 1860’s and 1870’s under the influence of Charles 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 written during the next two decades, 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 cycles. Cinq mélodies "de Venise", Op. 58 (1891), 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 (1894), 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.Gabriel Fauré's operas have not found a place in the regular repertoire. Prométhée is the more neglected of the two, with only a handful of performances in more than a century. Copland considered Pénélope (1913) 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 leitmotifs, 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." On the rare occasions when the piece has been staged, critical opinion has generally praised the musical quality of the score, but has varied as to the dramatic effectiveness of the work. When the opera was first presented in London in 1970, in a student production by the Royal Academy of Music, Peter Heyworth wrote, "A score that offers rich rewards to an attentive ear can none the less fail to cut much ice in the theatre. ... Most of the music is too recessive to be theatrically effective." However, after a 2006 production at the Wexford Festival, Ian Fox wrote, "Fauré's Pénélope is a true rarity, and, although some lovely music was anticipated, it was a surprise how sure the composer's theatrical touch was." |
Piano works |
| Gabriel Fauré's major sets of piano works are thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, six impromptus, and four valses-caprices. These sets were composed across the decades of his career, and display the change in his style from uncomplicated youthful charm to a final enigmatic, but sometimes fiery introspection, by way of a turbulent period in his middle years. His other notable piano pieces, including shorter works, or collections composed or published as a set, are Romances sans paroles, Ballade in F sharp major, Mazurka in B flat major, Thème et variations in C sharp major, and Huit pièces brèves. For piano duet, Fauré composed the Dolly Suite and, together with his friend and former pupil André Messager, an exuberant parody of Wagner in the short suite Souvenirs de Bayreuth.The piano works often use arpeggiated 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 Franz Liszt found Fauré's piano music hard to play. The early piano works are clearly influenced by F. Chopin. An even greater influence was Robert Schumann, whose piano music Fauré loved more than any other. In Copland's view, it was with the 6th Nocturne that 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. In his piano music, as in most of his works, Fauré shunned virtuosity in favour of the classical lucidity often associated with the French. He was unimpressed by purely virtuoso pianists, saying, "the greater they are, the worse they play me." |
Orchestral and chamber works |
| Gabriel Fauré was not greatly interested in orchestration, and on occasion asked his former students such as Jean Roger-Ducasse and Charles Koechlin to orchestrate his concert and theatre works. In Nectoux's words, Fauré's generally sober orchestral style reflects "a definite aesthetic attitude ... The idea of timbre was not a determining one in Fauré's musical thinking". He was not attracted by flamboyant combinations of tone-colours, which he thought either self-indulgent or a disguise for lack of real musical invention. He told his students that it should be possible to produce an orchestration without resorting to glockenspiels, celestas, xylophones, bells or electrical instruments. Debussy admired the spareness of Fauré's orchestration, finding in it the transparency he strove for in his own 1913 ballet Jeux; Francis Poulenc, by contrast, described Fauré's orchestration as "a leaden overcoat ... instrumental mud". Fauré's best-known orchestral works are the suites Masques et bergamasques (based on music for a dramatic entertainment, or divertissement comique), which he orchestrated himself, Dolly, orchestrated by Henri Rabaud, and Pelléas et Mélisande drawing on incidental music for Maeterlinck's play; the stage version was orchestrated by Koechlin, but Fauré himself reworked the orchestration for the published suite.In the chamber repertoire, his two piano quartets, particularly the first, are among Gabriel Fauré's better-known works. His other chamber music includes two piano quintets, two cello sonatas, two violin sonatas, 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 Record Guide commented, "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 by critics in Gramophone magazine as an intimameditation on the last things, and "an extraordinary work by any standards, ethereal and other-worldly with themes that seem constantly to be drawn skywards." |
