1845–1924 · France · 20th century
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) was a French composer, organist and teacher who served as director of the Paris Conservatoire. He wrote close to a hundred songs (mélodies) for voice and piano, as well as piano and chamber works. The site holds his songs at various levels of difficulty, along with a few instrumental pieces.
Gabriel Fauré was born on 12 May 1845 in Pamiers, in the south of France. His father, Toussaint-Honoré Fauré, worked as a schoolteacher; when the boy was four, his father was appointed head of a teacher-training college at Montgauzy, near Foix, and the family was reunited soon after — before that, the young Fauré had been in the care of a foster mother.
At nine, his father took the boy to Paris and placed him in Louis Niedermeyer's school of church music, where future organists and choir directors for Catholic churches received their training. One of Fauré's teachers there was Camille Saint-Saëns: after the founder's death in 1861 it was Saint-Saëns who took charge of the piano classes and introduced pupils to the music of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Fauré spent eleven years within those walls; he finished his studies there in 1865, earning top honours in organ and piano as well as in harmony and composition, together with a diploma in choir directing, and that same year the composition prize went to his Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11.
After leaving the school, Fauré became organist of the Church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes, in Brittany. He found the post tedious, did not get on with the parish priest, and after four years left Rennes for Paris, where he became assistant organist at Notre-Dame de Clignancourt in the city's north, though he remained there only a few months. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Fauré took part in the defence of Paris.
During the Paris Commune (March–May 1871), Fauré left the capital, staying first with a brother at Rambouillet before moving on to Switzerland, where the Niedermeyer school had set up temporarily; there he took a teaching post, and it was there that he first taught a young André Messager, who remained a close friend for the rest of his life. In October 1871 Fauré returned to Paris, took up the post of choirmaster at the church of Saint-Sulpice under the organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor, and began attending the musical salons of Saint-Saëns and Pauline Viardot, to which Saint-Saëns himself had introduced him. In 1871 Fauré also helped found the Société Nationale de Musique, a body Romain Bussine and Saint-Saëns set up so that new French music would have somewhere to be heard; its other members included Henri Duparc, Vincent d'Indy, Emmanuel Chabrier, Georges Bizet and César Franck. From 1874 Fauré acted as the society's secretary, and many of his own works had their first hearing at its concerts.
In 1874 Fauré moved to the Church of the Madeleine, where he deputised on the organ for Saint-Saëns during the latter's frequent concert tours. Fauré was renowned for his improvising, but he played the organ chiefly for the steady income it brought him, and preferred the piano. The year 1877 turned out to be notable for him in more than one way: a Société Nationale concert in January gave a successful premiere to his First Violin Sonata, and in March Saint-Saëns gave up the organist's post at the Madeleine — he was succeeded by Théodore Dubois, and Fauré then took over the vacant post of choirmaster.
In July of that same year, 1877, Fauré became engaged to Marianne, daughter of Pauline Viardot, but later in 1877 the engagement was broken off for a reason that is not entirely clear. Around this time he was working on his First Piano Quartet, finishing it only in 1879. To take his mind off his troubles, Saint-Saëns invited Fauré to accompany him to Weimar, where the young composer met Franz Liszt; the trip gave Fauré a taste for travel that stayed with him for the rest of his life. From 1878 Fauré travelled with Messager to see Wagner's operas in Cologne, Munich, London and Bayreuth; he admired Wagner, yet, unlike most composers of his generation, was never drawn under Wagner's musical influence. In 1883 Fauré married Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet; the couple had two sons — the elder, Emmanuel, went on to become a noted specialist in marine biology, and the younger, Philippe, became a noted writer.
To support his family, Fauré conducted the daily services at the Madeleine and gave piano and harmony lessons; his compositions brought him very little money, and it was only in summer that he had real time for composing. During these years he wrote several large-scale works, but he later destroyed most of them after a handful of performances, keeping only a few movements so that he could reuse their themes in later pieces. Among the works that did survive is the Requiem, begun in 1887 and reworked over the years until it reached its final version in 1901.
From his thirties, Fauré went through recurring bouts of what he himself called "spleen", and these bouts were possibly caused in part by the broken engagement and by a feeling that he was not sufficiently recognised as a composer. In 1890 a well-paid commission to write an opera to a libretto by Paul Verlaine collapsed when the poet failed to deliver the text, and Fauré sank into a depression so deep that his friends genuinely feared for his health. It was Winnaretta de Scey-Montbéliard — a longstanding friend of his — who then invited him to Venice, where his energy and desire to compose returned: there he wrote the first of five "Mélodies de Venise". Around 1892 Fauré met Emma Bardac; this meeting coincided with a fresh burst of creativity that included, among other things, the song cycle "La bonne chanson". At around the same time he wrote the piano-duet suite "Dolly" (1894–1897), dedicated to Bardac's daughter Hélène, nicknamed Dolly.
In 1892 the Conservatoire's professor of composition, Ernest Guiraud, died, and Saint-Saëns urged Fauré to put himself forward for the vacant post; but the Conservatoire's leadership judged Fauré too modern for the post, and its director, Ambroise Thomas, would not let the appointment go through. Instead, Fauré was given another post left vacant by Guiraud's death — inspector of music conservatoires in the French provinces — which gave him a steady income and allowed him to stop teaching amateur pupils. In 1896 Ambroise Thomas died and Théodore Dubois became head of the Conservatoire; Fauré took over from Dubois as chief organist at the Madeleine. Massenet, the professor of composition who had expected to get Thomas's post, resigned in protest when he was passed over, and Fauré was appointed in his place.
Among Fauré's pupils at the Conservatoire were André Messager, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, George Enescu and Alfredo Casella. Fauré left the basic grounding of his students to his assistant, while he himself helped each of them apply the skills they had already learned in a way suited to their own gifts. In 1905, after a scandal over the Prix de Rome — his pupil Maurice Ravel had failed to win it for a sixth time — Dubois stepped down early as director, and Fauré was appointed in his place with government backing; he brought in independent outside judges for entrance exams and competitions, which led many teachers who had previously favoured their own private pupils to resign.
In 1909 Fauré was elected a member of the Institut de France. He toured as a conductor in France and elsewhere in Europe, and in 1910–1911 in Russia. Over the final twenty years of his life, his hearing grew steadily worse. In 1920, at the age of 75, Fauré gave up his post as director of the Conservatoire. He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'Honneur.
In 1922 a national tribute to Fauré was held in Paris, led by the President of France, Alexandre Millerand. In his final months Fauré worked on a String Quartet. Twenty years earlier Ravel had dedicated his own String Quartet to him; now Ravel and others urged Fauré to write one of his own. Fauré long refused, thinking the genre too difficult, and once he decided to go ahead, he admitted he felt apprehensive about it. He worked on the quartet for about a year and completed the work on 11 September 1924 — under two months before he died; he turned down an offer to have it performed for him privately, because by then music sounded too distorted to his ear.
Fauré died in Paris of pneumonia on 4 November 1924, at the age of 79. His funeral service was held at the Church of the Madeleine, and he was buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris.
Fauré wrote in almost every genre of his time: close to a hundred songs to poems by Leconte de Lisle, Verlaine, Charles van Lerberghe and other poets, piano pieces, chamber ensembles including piano quartets and quintets, and "Pénélope" — Fauré's only opera, based on Homer's Odyssey and staged in Monte Carlo in 1913. Of his choral works, the best known is the Requiem: its lyricism and chamber-like sound were unusual for the genre. Among his orchestral pieces, the "Pavane" (Op. 50) stands out — it is widely known among music lovers in its piano version. Fauré wrote songs throughout his working life: the first, "Le papillon et la fleur", dates from 1861, while the later cycle "L'horizon chimérique" came sixty years and over a hundred songs afterwards; "Les roses d'Ispahan" belongs to the second volume of his songs.
Among Fauré's sacred choral works is the "Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville", written in 1881 together with his pupil and friend André Messager and reworked in 1906 and published in 1907 as "Messe basse", along with the "Cantique de Jean Racine" (Op. 11), Ave Maria, Salve Regina and Tantum ergo. Among his secular choral pieces are the harmonically refined "Madrigal" (Op. 35), set to words by Armand Silvestre, and "Les Djinns" (Op. 12), set to a text by Victor Hugo.
The site holds 19 sheet-music editions of Fauré's works, covering 17 different pieces ("Les roses d'Ispahan" and "Après un Rêve" each have two editions). The great majority, 17 editions, are songs for voice and piano; one more is the "Sicilienne" for solo guitar, and another is the "Berceuse" (Op. 56) for duet. By level, one piece is marked intermediate, thirteen upper intermediate, and five advanced; there are no elementary-level editions on the site.
A first acquaintance with Fauré's sheet music on the site can start with "Au cimetière" at intermediate level; the next step is a few upper-intermediate songs: "Les roses d'Ispahan", "Sicilienne" and "Les matelots"; for those who have mastered them, the advanced-level "Berceuse" (Op. 56) is a good fit.