GabrielFauré

As a boy, Fauré often went into the chapel to play the harmonium. His father ran a teachers’ training school at Montgauzy, near Foix, and Gabriel Fauré’s first musical experiences were on the small instrument in its chapel. In October 1854 his father took him to Paris and enrolled him at Louis Niedermeyer’s new school for church musicians. He was nine. For eleven years he studied plainchant, the organ and the polyphony of Renaissance church music.

After Niedermeyer died in 1861, Camille Saint-⁠Saëns took over the piano class. When the official lesson was over, he played the boys Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, composers well outside their syllabus. Saint-⁠Saëns became Fauré’s teacher, champion and friend, and remained so for sixty years. Fauré left school in 1865 with prizes and the Cantique de Jean Racine, a setting of a French prayer over a flowing keyboard part, in which each new choral entry joins a phrase already under way.

1866–⁠83Rennes, Paris and the Madeleine

His first post was at Saint-⁠Sauveur in Rennes, where he played the organ from 1866 and taught piano to supplement his pay. The parish priest had grounds for doubting his devotion. Fauré slipped out during sermons for a cigarette, and in 1870 arrived for Mass in evening clothes after a night at a ball. He was asked to resign. Saint-⁠Saëns helped him find another post in Paris; when war with Prussia broke out later that year, Fauré volunteered and fought in the actions to lift the siege of the city.

Back in Paris after the war, he worked at Saint-⁠Sulpice with Charles-⁠Marie Widor. The two sometimes improvised at the church’s separate organs, each trying to catch the other out with unexpected changes of key. He also joined the new Société Nationale de Musique, founded in 1871 to give French composers a hearing. Its concerts included chamber music, which had no place in the opera houses. Among the works performed there were his First Violin Sonata, warmly received in 1877, and the First Piano Quartet, begun the year before.

Pauline Viardot’s salon was another place where his music was heard. Fauré fell in love with her daughter Marianne; they became engaged in July 1877, and she broke off the engagement in November. That same year he became choirmaster at the Madeleine. In 1883 he married Marie Frémiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet; they had two sons. The household was paid for by his church services and private lessons. His publisher bought songs outright, so a successful song earned him no further royalties.

1887–⁠94The Requiem

In a conversation with Louis Aguettant on 12 July 1902, he explained his view of death: “a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness beyond”. The main body of the Dies irae, with its fire and judgement, is absent. The baritone’s Libera me sets words of fear, and the choir enters with a violent interruption. The sopranos sing the final movement, In paradisum, over a continuous organ figure. The final key is D major.

In the Pavane, written in 1887, the flute plays a tune in F♯ minor; Robert de Montesquiou’s optional choral words give the dancers jealousies and petty quarrels. Fauré wrote the nine Verlaine settings of La bonne chanson in 1892–⁠94 during his affair with the singer Emma Bardac. She tried out the songs as he brought them to her. The piano repeats melodies from earlier songs, the keys change often, and the final song sets the lovers’ happiness in spring.

1896–⁠1920Director of the Conservatoire

In 1896 he became principal organist at the Madeleine and succeeded Massenet as composition professor at the Conservatoire. Ravel, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt and Nadia Boulanger passed through his class. When the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell needed music for her London production of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1898, Koechlin helped his teacher with the hurried orchestration. In the concert suite, a flute and harp play the Sicilienne; in the spinning music the strings play a continuous figure beneath an oboe.

In June 1905, a month after the scandal over Ravel’s exclusion from the Prix de Rome final, Fauré succeeded Théodore Dubois as director of the Conservatoire. He had never been a student there. He brought in outside judges for examinations and competitions, which upset professors who were used to favouring their own private pupils, and he widened the range of music taught. The old guard called him Robespierre. His duties left him time to compose only in the summer holidays, which he spent at a hotel by a lake.

Fauré’s hearing had begun to fail in 1903. The trouble went beyond deafness, because high and low notes sounded distorted and out of tune to him, so that he heard a performance as different from what was written on the page. He went on teaching and composing until he retired from the Conservatoire in 1920. In 1922 the President of the Republic attended a public tribute to him at the Sorbonne, where Fauré sat through a concert of his own works that he could scarcely hear.

The late musicPénélope to the String Quartet

Pénélope, first performed in Monte Carlo in 1913, is in three acts and centres on Penelope’s waiting. Its returning themes follow Wagner’s example, while Penelope’s vocal lines are written in the manner of Fauré’s songs. In the Second Piano Quintet, completed in 1921, the viola begins a long melody over C minor arpeggios in the piano. The piano keeps up this motion as the other strings enter, until a sudden passage of chords stops it.

That same year Fauré, then in his seventies, set four poems by Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, who was killed in the First World War at the age of twenty-seven, as L’Horizon chimérique. The poems are about ships, distant places and imagined departures. Fauré dedicated the cycle to the young baritone Charles Panzéra, who gave the first performance in 1922 with his wife Magdeleine at the piano.

He finished the quartet in September 1924. He refused the offer of a private performance because his damaged hearing would have spoiled it. He died in Paris on 4 November. At his state funeral at the Madeleine four days later, the Requiem was performed again.