Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré: A Requiem Without Judgment

Every traditional Requiem Mass builds toward the Dies Irae, the terrifying sequence describing the day of wrath. Gabriel Fauré cut it. His Requiem, he said, was written "for the pleasure of it," and he later explained his approach to death itself: "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem," which he saw as "a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness" rather than an occasion for fear. A priest at its 1888 premiere reception told him dismissively, "We don't need these novelties: the Madeleine's repertoire is quite rich enough." History disagreed.

A Scholarship Boy in a Church School

Fauré was born May 12, 1845, in Pamiers in the south of France, the youngest of six children in a family with no particular musical background — his father ran a teacher-training college, and it was the chapel harmonium there that first seized him. "Every time I could get away I ran there," he recalled near the end of his life. "I was happy; and if that is what it means to have a vocation, then it is a very pleasant thing." A blind woman who heard him play alerted his father to the talent, and at nine he was sent, on scholarship, to the austere École Niedermeyer in Paris, where he spent eleven years training as a church musician. When the school's founder died in 1861, Camille Saint-Saëns took over piano instruction and opened the sixteen-year-old Fauré's ears to Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner — composers the curriculum otherwise ignored. "From this time dates the almost filial attachment," Fauré wrote, "the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I have had for him." Saint-Saëns remained mentor, advocate, and friend for the rest of Fauré's life; his biographer Jean-Michel Nectoux notes that "at each step in Fauré's career, Saint-Saëns's shadow can effectively be taken for granted."

Organ Lofts and War

Fauré's early career was provincial and unglamorous: organist at Rennes, where he resigned after arriving to play Mass in evening dress following an all-night ball; then Paris, interrupted almost immediately by the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served in combat and won the Croix de Guerre. He fled the violent Paris Commune of 1871 for Switzerland, where his music took on what biographers describe as "a new sombreness" utterly unlike the patriotic music his contemporaries were writing. Back in Paris he became choirmaster at Saint-Sulpice, then deputy and eventually chief organist at the Église de la Madeleine — a post he held, without ever writing a single solo organ work, for four decades, because he privately found the instrument too limiting.

Heartbreak, Marriage, and a Late-Blooming Passion

In 1877 — a pivotal year, and the year his first Violin Sonata marked what Nectoux calls his first true masterpiece — Fauré became engaged to Marianne Viardot, daughter of the singer Pauline Viardot, only to have her break it off months later without explanation. Devastated, he was taken by Saint-Saëns to meet Franz Liszt in Weimar, sparking a lifelong love of travel. He married Marie Fremiet, a sculptor's daughter, in 1883 — a marriage his biographer describes bluntly as between a man of considerable charm to women and a wife "without beauty, wit or a fortune," though he wrote to her tenderly and often while away. Two sons followed, one a distinguished biologist. Fauré's real emotional and creative fuel, though, came from outside the marriage: an affair beginning around 1892 with the singer Emma Bardac produced, by consensus of his biographers, a genuine creative breakthrough — the song cycle *La bonne chanson* among its fruits — and from around 1900 a lasting relationship with the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, whom he kept in a Paris apartment as an open companion until his death.

The Reformer Who Modernized the Conservatoire

Fauré's harmonic language was considered dangerously modern by the Paris musical establishment for most of his career. When a professorship opened at the Conservatoire in 1892, its director Ambroise Thomas refused outright: "Fauré? Never! If he's appointed, I resign." Fauré instead took the consolation post of provincial inspector until Thomas's death cleared the way for a professorship, and then, in 1905, after a Prix de Rome scandal in which the reactionary faculty was seen to have sabotaged his own student Maurice Ravel, Fauré was installed as director of the entire institution. He reformed it root and branch — bringing in independent outside judges for competitions, ending the preferential treatment that had enriched senior professors, and opening the curriculum to Wagner and beyond. Furious colleagues nicknamed him "Robespierre." His pupils over these years amount to a roll call of the coming century of French music: Ravel, George Enescu, Nadia Boulanger, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt. He taught less by formula than by ear: "What Fauré developed among his pupils," wrote the critic Henry Prunières, "was taste, harmonic sensibility, the love of pure lines... but he never gave them recipes for composing according to his style." When Ravel's early String Quartet drew a cool first reaction, Fauré reconsidered days later, telling him simply, "I could have been wrong."

Deafness, and a Last Quartet Written in Silence

From his fifties Fauré began losing his hearing, and worse — the remaining sound distorted, with high and low pitches falling painfully out of tune, so that attending performances of his own music became close to torment. He retired from the Conservatoire in 1920, received the Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneur that year, and in 1922 was given an unprecedented national tribute at the Sorbonne, where, in the words of a contemporary account in the Musical Times, he sat through a concert of his own works "able to hear not a single note," yet "gazing before him pensively, and, in spite of everything, grateful and content." In his final months, having refused for years to attempt the genre out of dread of Beethoven's shadow — "this is a genre which Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes all those who are not Beethoven to be terrified of it," he told his wife — Fauré composed his only String Quartet, finishing it in September 1924, weeks before his death, and declining to hear even a private run-through because the distortion had become unbearable. He died of pneumonia in Paris on November 4, 1924, at seventy-nine, and was given a state funeral at the Madeleine.

Why Gabriel Is Called a Genius

Fauré's genius is one of synthesis and quiet radicalism rather than spectacle: he built a harmonic language of unresolved discords and shifting, ambiguous tonal centers that, in critic Robert Orledge's words, "reconciled such opposing elements as modality and tonality, anguish and serenity, seduction and force within a single non-eclectic style." He anticipated Impressionist harmony before Debussy fully arrived at it, and his late works, written while he could no longer trust his own ears, pushed toward the tonal instability Schoenberg would soon make explicit. Ravel credited him directly with saving French song from German domination. Aaron Copland, who studied his scores closely, called him "the Brahms of France" and judged the Piano Quintet No. 2 "a pure well of spirituality." The honest counter-case: Fauré's innovations are subtle to the point of invisibility to a casual listener — his rhythms rarely surprise, his forms rarely break with tradition, and detractors including Poulenc dismissed his orchestration as "instrumental mud," since Fauré had little interest in tone color and handed most orchestration to students. His genius operated almost entirely inside harmony and melodic line — a composer's composer, whose most radical decisions are audible mainly to those listening for them.

Legacy

Fauré's Requiem took decades to reach international audiences — its English premiere came only in 1937, thirteen years after his death — but it is now among the most performed choral works in the repertoire. His Conservatoire reforms reshaped French musical education for a generation, even as his own successor reversed course and declared "modernism is the enemy." Composer Jean Roger-Ducasse's tribute has held up: Fauré, he wrote, was "the master par excellence of French music," more profound than Saint-Saëns, more classic than Debussy — a judgment history, on the whole, has not overturned.

Achievements

• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1923
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1890
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1903
• Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1910
• Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1920
• Notable work: Requiem
• Notable work: Élégie
• Notable work: Piano Quintet No. 2
• Instruments: pipe organ
• Genres: opera, Romantic music and classical music