Fauré Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) 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 Pavane, Requiem, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.

Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a small boy. At the age of nine, 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. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated 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 French Republic. Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.

Fauré's 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 Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were 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 influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

In the rigid official musical establishment of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, Gabriel Fauré won acceptance with difficulty. He was a pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns at the Ecole Niedermeyer and served as organist at various Paris churches, including finally the Madeleine, but he had no teaching position until 1897 at the Conservatoire, where his pupils included Ravel and Enescu. In 1905 he became director of the Conservatoire in the aftermath of the scandal of the refusal of the Prix de Rome to Ravel and introduced a number of necessary reforms. He retired in 1920, after which he was able to devote himself more fully again to composition, notably two final chamber works, a piano trio and a string quartet. He died in Paris in 1924.

Stage Works

In 1893 Fauré wrote incidental music for a production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. The Sicilienne for this production was later used again in incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and later still won popularity in a variety of arrangements, including the composer’s own orchestral version and arrangement for violin or cello and piano. There is a concert suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, orchestrated by Fauré’s pupil Koechlin.

Orchestral Music

Fauré’s nostalgic Pavane is an orchestral work with an optional chorus part, added at the suggestion of a patron, but generally omitted in modern performance. Music for solo instrument and orchestra includes the Ballade for piano and orchestra, Berceuse for solo violinand Elégie for solo cello. The piano duet Dolly Suite was arranged for orchestra in 1906 by Henri Rabaud.

Vocal

Fauré is a song composer of major importance, capturing in his settings the spirit of his time, the mood of nostalgic yearning for the unattainable. Some of the songs, such as ‘Après un rêve’ (‘After a Dream’) have achieved even wider popularity in instrumental transcription. In addition to individual songs of great beauty, ‘Lydia’, ‘Clair de lune’, ‘Les roses d’Ispahan’, ‘Sylvia’, ‘En prière’ and many others, there are song cycles, including the Verlaine settings La bonne chanson and Cinq mélodies de Venise, L’horizon chimérique, La chanson d’Eve and Le jardin clos.

Church Music

Fauré’s Requiem remains a standard element in choral repertoire, with its setting of funeral rites rather than the full Requiem Mass of tradition. The earlier Messe basse (‘Low Mass’) was originally a collaborative composition of 1881 with Messager, but its final revision in 1906 consists of four Mass movements by Fauré himself.

Chamber Music

Chamber music by Fauré includes two fine violin sonatas and the Piano Trio and String Quartet of his last years. There are several evocative smaller pieces, including Romance, Berceuse and Andante for violin and piano and Elégie, Romance and Sérénade for cello and piano.

Piano Music

Fauré made a significant addition to piano repertoire, particularly in a series of thirteen barcarolles and a similar number of nocturnes, with five impomptus and a single ballade. The piano duet Dolly Suite was written in the 1890s for the young daughter of Emma Bardac, the later wife of Debussy and the singer for whom Fauré wrote La bonne chanson, after Bardac’s divorce from her banker husband.