Fauré

Who was Fauré?

Gabriel Fauré - Sicilienne Op 78 (partition de piano, sheet music)

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Gabriel Fauré: The Quiet Revolutionary of French Music

Biography: From Pamiers to the Paris Conservatoire

Gabriel Urbain Fauré was born on 12 May 1845 in Pamiers, a small town in the Ariège department of southern France, and died in Paris on 4 November 1924. He was the youngest of six children born to Toussaint-Honoré Fauré, a schoolmaster, and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade, the daughter of a minor noble family. Although the Fauré family had once been substantial landowners dating back to the thirteenth century, by the nineteenth century their means had become considerably reduced. None of Gabriel’s siblings displayed musical talent; his four brothers pursued careers in journalism, politics, the army, and the civil service, while his sister led a traditional life as the wife of a public servant.

Fauré’s musical abilities became apparent at an early age. When the Swiss composer and pedagogue Louis Niedermeyer heard the boy, he immediately accepted him as a pupil at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, where Fauré was trained as a church organist and choirmaster. This institution, founded to promote a revival of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony, provided Fauré with an education fundamentally different from that offered at the Paris Conservatoire. At the École Niedermeyer, he studied piano with Camille Saint-Saëns, who introduced him to the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner and became a lifelong friend and mentor. While still a student, Fauré published his first composition, the Trois romances sans paroles for piano (1863).

After graduating in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. He held positions at various churches before being appointed organist at the Église de la Madeleine in Paris in 1896, a post he retained until 1905. In the same year, he became professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught a generation of composers who would shape twentieth-century French music. In 1905, he succeeded Théodore Dubois as director of the Conservatoire, a position he held until ill health and increasing deafness forced him to resign in 1920. During his final years, he was recognized in France as the leading French composer of his day, and in 1922 an unprecedented national musical tribute was held in his honor in Paris, headed by the President of the French Republic.

Fauré’s personal life was marked by both professional triumph and private difficulty. He married Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, in 1883, but the marriage was not a happy one, and Fauré sought emotional fulfillment elsewhere, notably in a long and intense relationship with Emma Bardac, who later became the second wife of Claude Debussy. His increasing deafness during the last two decades of his life isolated him from the social world of music, yet he continued to compose works of extraordinary refinement and harmonic daring until the end.

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Musical Style and Innovations

Fauré’s musical style occupies a unique position in the history of Western music. His oeuvre, though showing the influence of late-Romantic music, is unique and comprises some of the most inventive harmonic language to be found in Western music, characterized by the complex integration of advanced tonal and modal procedures. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, noting that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations.

Fauré’s music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the twentieth century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing; by the time of his death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. Throughout this period of extraordinary stylistic change, Fauré maintained a distinctive voice that was neither reactionary nor avant-garde in the manner of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, but rather evolved organically according to its own internal logic. His style is characterized by refined and gentle expression, clarity of texture, and a profound sense of understated humanity.

Fauré excelled not only as a songwriter of great refinement and sensitivity but also as a composer in every branch of chamber music. He wrote more than 100 songs, including “Après un rêve” (c. 1865) and “Les Roses d’Ispahan” (1884), and song cycles that included La Bonne Chanson (1891–92) and L’Horizon chimérique (1922). He enriched the literature of the piano with a number of highly original and exquisitely wrought works, of which his thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, and five impromptus are perhaps the most representative and best known.

One of the most striking features of Fauré’s stylistic development is the contrast between his earlier and later works. 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. During the last twenty years of his life, 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. This late style, exemplified by works such as the Second Cello Sonata (1922), the Piano Trio (1923), and the String Quartet (1924), represents one of the most remarkable instances of stylistic evolution in the history of music, rivaling that of Beethoven or Verdi in its capacity for continued development and deepening expression.

Chord Progressions and Music Harmony

Fauré’s harmonic language is among the most distinctive and innovative aspects of his art. His personal approach to harmony, gained during his training at the École Niedermeyer and differing from that taught at the Paris Conservatoire, was based on the teaching of Gustave Lefèvre; it stressed semitonal chord alteration, pitch reinterpretation, freedom of dissonance resolution, and distant modulation. This pedagogical background gave Fauré a harmonic vocabulary that was fundamentally different from that of his contemporaries who had studied at the Conservatoire, and it allowed him to explore tonal regions and chordal combinations that were considered unusual or even incorrect by academic standards.

Fauré’s music is a synthesis of tonal and modal harmonies. Traditional tonal progressions provide the large-scale structural harmonies, while modal successions are the embellishing sonorities whose predominance characterizes the sound of his mature style. His work employs a few simple triads and exploits multiple combinations of various seventh chords in a harmonic synthesis of tonality and modality. The traditional tonal progression I–IV–V–I is proposed as the underlying harmonic support of much of his music, but this conventional framework is constantly enriched and complicated by modal inflections, chromatic alterations, and unexpected chordal extensions.

Fauré’s use of chordal extensions is particularly noteworthy. His music features the license of contrapuntal use of chordal extensions such as ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, and the expansion of the initial tonic through the expansion of the harmony by 5–6 shifts. These extensions are not merely decorative but are integrated into the contrapuntal fabric of the music, creating a harmonic texture of remarkable richness and ambiguity. Maurice Ravel captured the essence of Fauré’s harmonic practice when he wrote of “exceptional resolutions, ambiguities, modulations to remote keys that bring us to the principal key by unknown paths; so many are the perilous games that Fauré played from the first as a master”.

Fauré’s harmonic innovations are particularly evident in his songs, which span his entire compositional career and provide a comprehensive record of his stylistic evolution. His last song cycle, L’Horizon chimérique (1922), is the only one of his seven song cycles unified by an overall harmonic scheme. The work employs few triads and exploits multiple combinations of various seventh chords in a harmonic synthesis of tonality and modality. The sketches for this cycle, based on Schenkerian models, demonstrate the contrapuntal origins of Fauré’s harmonic language, showing how his apparently exotic chord progressions are rooted in the fundamental contrapuntal motion of outer voices.

Fauré’s approach to harmonic progression often involves what has been called “tonal sidestepping,” a technique whereby the music momentarily tonicizes a distant key before returning to the principal tonality by unexpected means. This technique creates a sense of harmonic fluidity and ambiguity that is characteristic of Fauré’s mature style. In his analysis of Fauré’s Le secret, Ravel noted the composer’s mastery of these “perilous games,” which create a sense of continual harmonic surprise within an overall framework of tonal coherence.

Relationships with Other Artists

Fauré’s relationships with other artists and musicians were central to his development and to his legacy. His most important early relationship was with Camille Saint-Saëns, who became his piano teacher at the École Niedermeyer and remained a lifelong friend and champion. Saint-Saëns introduced the young Fauré to the music of Liszt and Wagner, broadening his musical horizons beyond the confines of the church music tradition in which he had been trained. The two men maintained a close friendship for decades, though it was tested in later years by Fauré’s support for the more progressive musical tendencies that Saint-Saëns opposed.

Fauré’s relationships with the poets whose texts he set were equally significant. He encountered such giants as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, the patrician Leconte de Lisle, and the Belgian symbolist Charles Van Lerberghe. His first poet was Victor Hugo, whose poetry he set in the 1860s and 1870s, and later he turned increasingly to the Symbolist poets, whose emphasis on suggestion and nuance perfectly matched his own musical aesthetic. The Belgian poet Charles Van Lerberghe provided the texts for La Chanson d’Ève (1906–10), one of Fauré’s most important song cycles, while Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s poems formed the basis of L’Horizon chimérique.

Among Fauré’s most important relationships was his connection with Emma Bardac, the muse who inspired some of his greatest song cycles, including La Bonne Chanson (1891–92) and La Chanson d’Ève. Emma Bardac was also the lover of Claude Debussy, and the complex emotional entanglements between Fauré, Bardac, and Debussy form a fascinating chapter in the social history of French music at the turn of the century. The docudrama The Loves of Emma Bardac explores this relationship in detail.

As a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire from 1896 to 1920, Fauré influenced a generation of composers who would shape twentieth-century music. Among his students were Maurice Ravel, Georges Enesco, and Nadia Boulanger. Fauré’s teaching method, which he applied to students like Ravel and Enesco, emphasised the development of individual voice rather than the imposition of a rigid stylistic doctrine. His influence as a pedagogue is often overshadowed by his reputation as a composer, but his teaching helped to transmit the values of clarity, craftsmanship, and harmonic innovation to the next generation.

Fauré’s position in French musical life brought him into contact with many of the leading artistic figures of his time. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1909, and his circle included not only musicians but also poets, painters, and writers. His relationships with Debussy and Ravel were complex: he admired their music but maintained his own independent stylistic path, and he was sometimes criticised by the younger generation for what they perceived as his conservatism, even as his harmonic innovations were themselves revolutionary.

Influences and Legacy

Fauré’s musical influences were diverse and included both his immediate predecessors and his contemporaries. The most important early influence was Saint-Saëns, who introduced him to the music of Liszt and Wagner. Fauré also absorbed the influence of Chopin, particularly in his piano music, where the Polish composer’s example of lyrical melodic writing and subtle harmonic coloring is evident. The influence of French Baroque music, especially that of Couperin and Rameau, is also discernible in Fauré’s clarity of texture and his preference for elegant, balanced forms.

Fauré’s legacy extends far beyond his own compositions. He is regarded as the first member of a French musical “trinity” that included Debussy and Ravel, and as an early Modernist who provided a reference point for composers including Francis Poulenc. His harmonic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations, and his songs and chamber music remain central to the repertoire.

The rehabilitation of Fauré’s reputation has been a significant focus of musicological research since his death. In 1945, in the introduction to the first comprehensive study of his art, scholars began the process of reconsidering and rehabilitating his music, which had been somewhat neglected in the decades following his death. This process has continued to the present day, and Fauré is now recognized as one of the most important French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Works and Compositions

Main article on Wikipedia: List of compositions by Gabriel Fauré

Fauré’s catalogue of works is extensive and varied, encompassing opera, incidental music, orchestral music, chamber music, piano music, and song. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano, and the songs “Après un rêve” and “Clair de lune”. His most celebrated works include the Requiem (notable for its gentle, “lullaby-like” tone), the Pavane, and the orchestral suite Pelléas et Mélisande. His late works, such as the String Quartet and the Piano Trio, are increasingly recognised as among his finest achievements.

Fauré wrote incidental music for several plays, including Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1898), as well as two lyric dramas, Prométhée (1900) and Pénélope (1913). Among his few works written for the orchestra alone is Masques et bergamasques (1919). His Ballade for piano and orchestra (1881; originally arranged for solo piano, 1877–79), two sonatas for violin and piano, and Berceuse for violin and piano (1880) are among other popular works. The Élégie for cello and piano (1880; arranged for orchestra, 1896), and two sonatas for cello and piano, as well as chamber pieces, are frequently performed and recorded.

Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, Op. 48, is his most famous work. Begun in 1877 and largely composed in the late 1880s, the work was not completed until 1900. Unusually gentle for a requiem mass, it omits the Dies irae and presents a serene, consoling view of death and the afterlife. Fauré’s view of death is conveyed in the prevailing homophonic textures and by the muted colours of the orchestration. The work’s most famous movement, the In Paradisum, exemplifies its tranquil, almost luminous character.

Fauré’s song cycles are among his most important contributions to the genre. La Bonne Chanson (1891–92), a setting of poems by Paul Verlaine, is a work of great tenderness and harmonic subtlety. La Chanson d’Ève (1906–10), based on poems by Charles Van Lerberghe, is a more mystical and harmonically adventurous work. L’Horizon chimérique (1922), his last cycle, is a work of autumnal beauty and harmonic daring.

Works on Film

Fauré’s music has been extensively used in film soundtracks, bringing his compositions to audiences far beyond the concert hall. His Pavane, Op. 50, has been featured in several films, including The Conformist (1970), The Great Beauty (2013), and The King’s Speech (2010). It has also been used in television shows such as The Crown (2016). The Sicilienne from the Pelléas et Mélisande suite has appeared in numerous films, and his songs, particularly “Après un rêve,” have been widely used in cinematic contexts.

Fauré’s music has also been used in films as diverse as My Brilliant Career (1979), which features “After A Dream,” and A Sunday in the Country (1984), for which his music served as the original score. The soundtrack of Les destinées sentimentales (2000) includes extracts from Fauré’s music alongside works by Guillaume Lekeu. His Pavane was also used in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). In Thérèse (1986), Alain Cavalier used music by Fauré and Offenbach to evoke the life of Thérèse of Lisieux.

Known Compositions and Performances

Fauré’s most known compositions include the Requiem, Op. 48; the Pavane, Op. 50; the Élégie for cello and piano, Op. 24; the Berceuse for violin and piano, Op. 16; the Ballade for piano and orchestra, Op. 19; the Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 13; the Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15; the Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor, Op. 45; the String Quartet in E minor, Op. 121; and the Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120. His song cycles La Bonne Chanson, La Chanson d’Ève, and L’Horizon chimérique are central to the vocal repertoire.

Among the most celebrated performances of Fauré’s music are those conducted by Nadia Boulanger, who was instrumental in promoting the Requiem after World War II. The Requiem has been recorded numerous times, with notable recordings including those conducted by Roger Wagner, Paavo Järvi, and many others. The complete piano music has been recorded by artists including Kathryn Stott and Jean-Philippe Collard, while the chamber music has been championed by ensembles such as the Domus Quartet and the Quatuor Ébène.

Documentaries

Several documentaries have been produced about Fauré’s life and work. Gabriel Faure Requiem (2014) is a 52-minute documentary film discussing the life and work of the composer, including a full-length performance of the Requiem with additional insight from members of the Tim Keyes Consort. Fauré, Baum, and the Others: Ici-bas: Music and Poetry, directed by Pauline Jardel, explores Fauré’s mélodies and their relationship to poetry. Gabriel Fauré, L’Horizon Chimérique (2004) is a documentary presented by Jean-François Zygel.

The Loves of Emma Bardac is a French impressionist musical docudrama that presents the dramatic story of Emma Bardac, muse to both Fauré and Debussy, and the daughters she bore. Enjoy Fauré: Nocturnes & Barcarolles (2023) is a documentary that explores Fauré’s piano music and its reflection of his life circumstances and emotions.

Fauré, the innovator

Gabriel Fauré was a composer whose refined and gentle music influenced the course of modern French music. His harmonic innovations, rooted in a distinctive pedagogical tradition and developed through a lifetime of compositional experimentation, opened new possibilities for tonal and modal expression that would be explored by later generations of composers. His songs, chamber music, piano works, and sacred music remain central to the repertoire, and his influence as a teacher helped to shape the course of twentieth-century French music. In the words of the Grove Dictionary, he was the most advanced composer of his generation in France, and his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. Fauré’s music, with its blend of elegance and profundity, intimacy and innovation, continues to speak to listeners with a voice that is both of its time and timeless.

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Fauré - Cantique de Jean Racine Op. 11 Piano Solo arr. (partition, sheet music, Noten, partitura)