Gabriel Fauré
French Romantic known for his luminous Requiem and refined chamber music
1845
1924
French
Romantic
Requiem, Pavane, Sicilienne
Early life
Gabriel Fauré was born on 12 May 1845 in Pamiers, in the Ariège department of southern France. At the age of nine he was sent to the École Niedermeyer in Paris, a school specialising in church music, where he spent eleven years studying organ, plainchant, and composition. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who introduced the young Fauré to the music of Liszt, Schumann, and Wagner, broadening his horizons well beyond the school's ecclesiastical curriculum. This blend of modal church music and Romantic harmony proved foundational to Fauré's mature style.
Career and major works
After graduating in 1865, Fauré held a succession of organist posts in Paris, culminating in his appointment as organist at the Madeleine in 1896 and, later that year, as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, where he succeeded Massenet. In 1905 he was named director of the Conservatoire, a post he held until 1920, during which time he reformed the institution's notoriously conservative curriculum. His pupils included Ravel, Enescu, Nadia Boulanger, and Charles Koechlin. Fauré's major works include the Requiem in D minor (1890), celebrated for its serene and consoling character — he deliberately omitted the Dies Irae, wishing to express 'a lullaby of death' rather than terror; the orchestral suite Pelléas et Mélisande (1898); the song cycles La Bonne Chanson (1894) and L'Horizon chimérique (1921); the Pavane (1887); the Sicilienne; the two piano quartets; and the late chamber works, including the Piano Trio (1923) and the String Quartet (1924).
Musical style and legacy
Fauré's music is characterised by subtle, continuously evolving harmony, long melodic lines that avoid obvious cadences, and an emotional restraint that yields profound depth beneath a polished surface. His late works, composed as increasing deafness isolated him from the world, achieve an austere, almost visionary beauty. He is widely regarded as the greatest French composer of art song, and his harmonic innovations — particularly his use of modal inflections and unresolved progressions — profoundly influenced Debussy and Ravel. He died in Paris on 4 November 1924.