Early years Fauré was born in
Pamiers, Ariège, in the south of France, the fifth son and youngest of six children of Toussaint-Honoré Fauré and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade. According to the biographer
Jean-Michel Nectoux, the Fauré family dates to the 13th century in that part of France. The family had at one time been substantial landowners, but by the 19th century its means had become reduced. The composer's paternal grandfather, Gabriel, was a butcher whose son became a schoolmaster. In 1829 Fauré's parents married. His mother was the daughter of a minor member of the nobility. He was the only one of the six children to display musical talent; his four brothers pursued careers in journalism, politics, the army and the civil service, and his sister had a traditional life as the wife of a public servant. When his father was appointed director of the École Normale d'Instituteurs, a teacher training college, at Montgauzy, near
Foix, in 1849, Fauré returned to live with his family. There was a chapel attached to the school, which Fauré recalled in the last year of his life: An old blind woman, who came to listen and give the boy advice, told his father of Fauré's gift for music. After reflecting for a year, Fauré's father agreed and took the nine-year-old boy to Paris in October 1854. Helped by a scholarship from the bishop of his home diocese, Fauré boarded at the school for 11 years. The régime was austere, the rooms gloomy, the food mediocre, and the required uniform elaborate. Fauré recalled in old age, "After allowing the lessons to run over, he would go to the piano and reveal to us those works of the masters from which the rigorous classical nature of our programme of study kept us at a distance and who, moreover, in those far-off years, were scarcely known. ... At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment ... the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I [have] had for him, throughout my life." Saint-Saëns took great pleasure in his pupil's progress, which he helped whenever he could; Nectoux comments that at each step in Fauré's career "Saint-Saëns's shadow can effectively be taken for granted." The close friendship between them lasted until Saint-Saëns died sixty years later. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including a
premier prix in composition for the
Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11, the earliest of his choral works to enter the regular repertory.
Organist and composer On leaving the École Niedermeyer, Fauré was appointed organist at the Church of Saint-Sauveur, at
Rennes in
Brittany. He took up the post in January 1866. During his four years at Rennes he supplemented his income by taking private pupils, giving "countless piano lessons". At Saint-Saëns's regular prompting he continued to compose, but none of his works from this period survive. He was bored at Rennes and had an uneasy relationship with the parish priest, who correctly doubted Fauré's religious conviction. Almost immediately, with the discreet aid of Saint-Saëns, 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. He was awarded a
Croix de Guerre. in middle row second from right After France's defeat by
Prussia, there was a brief, bloody conflict within Paris from March to May 1871 during the
Commune. Fauré's compositions from this period did not overtly reflect the turmoil and bloodshed. Some of his colleagues, including Saint-Saëns,
Gounod and
Franck, produced elegies and patriotic odes. Fauré did not, but according to his biographer
Jessica Duchen, his music acquired "a new sombreness, a dark-hued sense of tragedy ... evident mainly in his songs of this period including ''L'Absent
, Seule!
and La Chanson du pêcheur''." 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. During some services, Widor and Fauré improvised simultaneously at the church's two organs, trying to catch each other out with sudden changes of key. Other members included
Georges Bizet,
Emmanuel Chabrier,
Vincent d'Indy,
Henri Duparc, César Franck,
Édouard Lalo and
Jules Massenet. Fauré became secretary of the society in 1874. In 1874 Fauré moved from Saint-Sulpice to the
Église de la Madeleine, acting as deputy 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. He was renowned for his improvisations, and Saint-Saëns said of him that he was "a first class organist when he wanted to be". Fauré preferred the piano to the organ, which he played only because it gave him a regular income. The year 1877 was significant for Fauré, both professionally and personally. In January his
first violin sonata was performed at a Société Nationale concert with great success, marking a turning-point in his composing career at the age of 31. In March, Saint-Saëns retired from the Madeleine, succeeded as organist by
Théodore Dubois, his choirmaster; Fauré was appointed to take over from Dubois. 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 indulged for the rest of his life. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent
Souvenirs de Bayreuth. This short, up-tempo piano work for four hands sends up themes from
The Ring. Fauré admired Wagner and had a detailed knowledge of his music, but he was one of the few composers of his generation not to come under Wagner's musical influence.
Middle years , 1889 In 1883 Fauré married Marie Fremiet, the daughter of a leading sculptor,
Emmanuel Fremiet. Nectoux comments that Marie was "without beauty, wit or a fortune ... narrow and cold", but records that "in spite of everything [Fauré] still felt a tenderness towards her". The marriage was affectionate, but Marie was, in Nectoux's phrase, "a stay-at-home", and she did not share her husband's wish to go out in the evenings, and became resentful of his frequent absences, his dislike of domestic life –
"horreur du domicile" – and his love affairs, while she remained at home. 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), The second son, Philippe, born in 1889, became a writer; his works included histories, plays, and biographies of his father and grandfather. Contemporary accounts agree that Fauré was extremely attractive to women; in Duchen's phrase, "his conquests were legion in the Paris salons." After a romantic attachment to the singer
Emma Bardac from around 1892, 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. To support his family, Fauré spent most of his time in running the daily services at the Madeleine and giving piano and harmony lessons. His compositions earned him a negligible amount, because his publisher bought them outright, paying him an average of 60
francs for a song, 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. After its first performance, in 1888, the priest in charge told the composer, "We don't need these novelties: the Madeleine's repertoire is quite rich enough." As a young man Fauré had been very cheerful; a friend wrote of his "youthful, even somewhat child-like, mirth." From his thirties he suffered bouts of depression, which he described as "
spleen", possibly first caused by his broken engagement and his lack of success as a composer.
Winnaretta de Scey-Montbéliard, always a good friend to Fauré, invited him to
Venice, where she had a
palazzo on the
Grand Canal. He recovered his spirits and began to compose again, writing the first of his five
Mélodies de Venise, to words by Verlaine, whose poetry he continued to admire despite the operatic debacle. About this time, or shortly afterwards, Fauré's liaison with Emma Bardac began; in Duchen's words, "for the first time, in his late forties, he experienced a fulfilling, passionate relationship which extended over several years". His principal biographers all agree that this affair inspired a burst of creativity and a new originality in his music, exemplified in the song cycle
La bonne chanson. Fauré wrote the
Dolly Suite for
piano duet between 1894 and 1897 and dedicated it to Bardac's daughter Hélène, known as "Dolly". During the 1890s Fauré's 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 faculty of the Conservatoire regarded Fauré as dangerously modern, and its 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. He disliked the prolonged travelling around the country that the work entailed, but the post gave him a steady income and enabled him to give up teaching amateur pupils. ,
Thomas,
Massenet,
Dubois 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:
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, and when Dubois was appointed instead, Massenet resigned his professorship in fury. Fauré was appointed 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. 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 Henry 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 [recipes] 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. 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 forty 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. Nectoux writes that Fauré's natural kindness and broad-mindedness predisposed him to emphasise the positive aspects of a work. Dubois, who became the subject of much censure, brought forward 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. 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). 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. The turn of the 20th century saw a rise in the popularity of 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 was in London for the premiere of
Elgar's
First Symphony in 1908 and dined with the composer. 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." 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
Aaron Copland was a devoted admirer. 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." 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, Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. He worked on the piece for a year, finishing it on 11 September 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. 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 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. 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
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==