Gabriel Fauré
The French composer whose elusive harmonic language shaped twentieth-century music while remaining accessible enough to make his Requiem one of the most performed choral works in the repertoire.
Gabriel Fauré spent the first half of his career in the shadow of the German Romantics and the second as the most distinguished figure in French music, a position he held with characteristic quietness. His Requiem — composed not as a dramatic confrontation with mortality but as a consolation — is the work most people know; his late piano music and chamber pieces, composed while he was going deaf, are the works his admirers know better and value more.
Formation and early career
Fauré was born in 1845 in Pamiers, in the south of France, the youngest of six children. At nine he was sent to the Niedermeyer school in Paris, a conservatory specialising in religious music, where he studied for eleven years under Louis Niedermeyer and, after Niedermeyer's death, Camille Saint-Saëns. Saint-Saëns introduced him to Liszt and to the music of Schumann and Wagner; Fauré absorbed all three without being captured by any of them.
His career for much of his adult life was that of a church organist and choirmaster — at Saint-Sulpice and later at the Madeleine in Paris — with composition fitted around professional duties. Recognition came slowly. He was fifty before his music circulated widely; the Requiem, composed in 1887–1888, was not published in anything close to its full form until much later.
The Requiem
Fauré's Requiem in D minor sets a selection of the Latin Mass for the Dead and adds a Pie Jesu and In Paradisum. What is absent is as significant as what is present: the Dies irae, the movement of judgment and terror that dominates settings by Verdi and Berlioz, is omitted. In its place Fauré gives the work a pervasive gentleness, a soft luminosity in the orchestration, and an ending — the In Paradisum — that is perhaps the most genuinely consoling passage in the choral repertoire. He described it as his vision of death: not terrifying, but restful.
Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I have put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.
Later works and the Conservatoire
Fauré's appointment as director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1905 brought institutional influence he used to modernise the curriculum and appoint progressive faculty. His students included Maurice Ravel, Georges Enescu, and Nadia Boulanger, who would teach virtually every significant American composer of the mid-twentieth century. His own later compositions — the Piano Quintet No. 2, the Cello Sonatas, the String Quartet — were composed while progressive deafness distorted the sounds he heard. He heard low notes as normal but high notes as displaced to wrong pitches; his late works adjust, using lower registers and a greater economy of texture.
Legacy
Fauré's harmonic language — his use of modes, his avoidance of obvious cadential resolutions, his preference for chromatic voice-leading over chromatic chords — was absorbed and extended by Ravel and Debussy. His songs (mélodies), more than a hundred of them, are a central contribution to French vocal literature. His influence on French composition is structural in a way that his relative obscurity in the wider concert repertoire does not reflect: the sound of twentieth-century French music begins with him.
