Gabriel Fauré
“People have called my Requiem a lullaby of death. But that is how I see death: not as a painful experience, but as a happy deliverance.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- TeacherLouis Niedermeyer
Founder of the school who taught him old chant and modal harmony, laying the roots of Fauré's music.
- TeacherCamille Saint-Saëns
The piano teacher he met at sixteen, who introduced him to Schumann·Liszt·Wagner and became a lifelong friend.
- InfluenceFranz Liszt
The aging master he met in Weimar in 1877, who looked over the young Fauré's piano pieces himself.
- FamilyMarie Fremiet
Daughter of the sculptor Fremiet, she became his wife in 1883, bore him two sons, and was the recipient of most of Fauré's letters.
- PatronageWinnaretta Singer
A patron of the salon who invited him to Venice, among other kindnesses, she gave breathing room to a composer hard-pressed to make a living.
- PupilMaurice Ravel
A pupil in his composition class at the Conservatoire, he dedicated “Jeux d'eau” to his teacher, and his failure to win the Prix de Rome put Fauré in the director's chair.
I. A child of the Montgauzy chapel · 1845–1854 (age 0–9)
(The youngest) He was born on May 12, 1845, in Pamiers, in the Ariège region of southwestern France. His father, Toussaint-Honoré Fauré, was a schoolteacher; his mother, Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade, came from a family of minor nobility in decline. Gabriel was the youngest of six children. (The wet nurse) Soon after his birth he was placed with a wet nurse in the nearby village of Verniolle, where he grew up until about the age of four, a custom not uncommon in the region at the time. Even after returning home, he is said to have been a quiet child who liked to be alone. (The harmonium) In 1849, when his father became director of the teachers' college at Montgauzy, near Foix, the family moved into the school's lodgings. The small chapel attached to the school had a harmonium, a little organ supplied with wind by foot pedals, and whenever he had a spare moment the boy would sit at it and make up sounds of his own. Recalling those years later in life, Fauré told of an old blind lady who often came to hear him play and gave him advice. (The decision) A local notable who heard the boy play urged his father to send him to a school of church music in Paris. To a father raising six children on a teacher's salary, a musician, let alone a church musician, hardly promised a comfortable future. He hesitated for some time, but on the condition that the school would ease the burden of tuition, he at last sent his nine-year-old youngest son alone to Paris in the autumn of 1854. Fauré never again lived for long in the place where he was born.
II. The Niedermeyer school · 1854–1865 (age 9–20)
(Boarding) Founded by Louis Niedermeyer, the school was a boarding school that trained cathedral organists and choirmasters. Discipline was strict, and even during holidays he could seldom make the journey to his family's home far to the south. Fauré spent eleven years there. (The modes) The heart of the curriculum was not opera but Gregorian chant and the polyphonic choral music of the Renaissance. Niedermeyer taught his students to accompany the old chants not in today's major and minor keys but in the medieval modes (the old frameworks of the scale). Fauré's characteristic harmony, which blurs the line between major and minor and slips quietly into unexpected keys, took root in this classroom. (Saint-Saëns) When Niedermeyer died in 1861, the twenty-five-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns arrived as piano teacher. He played his students the music of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, which had no place in the curriculum, and after lessons he would invite the boys to his home to play the piano together. Teacher and pupil, ten years apart, soon became friends, and their friendship lasted more than half a century. The letters they exchanged survive to this day. (The cantique) In 1865, the nineteen-year-old Fauré won the school's first prize in composition with the choral work “Cantique de Jean Racine,” written as he neared graduation. To a poem in which the seventeenth-century playwright Racine had rendered a Latin hymn into French, it set graceful, well-ordered music for chorus and keyboard. The restraint of the old church music and the warm harmonies of Romanticism were already one.
This graduation piece is the first work in which the restraint of church music learned at the Niedermeyer school became, in the hands of a nineteen-year-old, a fully realized composition.
- Listen in the opening for the broken chords (arpeggios) in which the keyboard spreads each harmony out note by note, letting it flow like ripples. These gentle ripples carry the entire piece.
- The passage in which the choral voices enter one by one and overlap sounds like voices of prayer gradually gathering.
- The text is Racine's rendering of a Latin hymn for the dawn office, asking that the sleeping soul be roused. The piece's dignity lies in never surging into loudness, staying hushed to the very end.
- Originally accompanied by keyboard, it also exists in versions for string ensemble with harmonium and for orchestra, so there is pleasure in comparing the texture from one performance to the next.
III. The organ bench and a broken engagement · 1866–1877 (age 21–32)
(Rennes) In 1866 he became organist of the church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes, in Brittany. Life in a provincial town was dull, and he passed the time teaching piano to the children of wealthy families. Early in 1870 he was obliged to give up the post. Stories have it that he stepped outside for a cigarette during a sermon, or that he turned up at morning Mass still in the tails he had worn at a ball all night. (War) That summer, back in Paris and working as organist at a small church, he saw war break out with Prussia. Fauré enlisted and fought in several battles of the Siege of Paris. After the war, fleeing the turmoil of the Paris Commune, he taught for a time at his old school, which had moved to Switzerland; a pupil from those days, André Messager, remained a close friend for life. (The society) In 1871 he founded the Société Nationale de Musique with Saint-Saëns, César Franck and others, a society meant to bring French instrumental and chamber music before a Parisian public preoccupied with opera. He assisted Widor at Saint-Sulpice and served as Saint-Saëns's deputy organist at the Madeleine. (The broken engagement) At the home of the great singer Pauline Viardot, to which Saint-Saëns had introduced him, he fell in love with her daughter Marianne. After five years of courtship they became engaged in July 1877, but three months later Marianne broke it off. His Violin Sonata No. 1, premiered in January of that year, was a success and won praise from Saint-Saëns, but the Leipzig publisher brought out the score without paying him any royalties. The thirty-two-year-old Fauré ended the year with neither love nor money in hand.
Written while he was courting Marianne Viardot, it became a symbol of his plight: for all its successful premiere, it earned him not a penny in royalties.
- In the first movement, the violin enters only after the piano has unfolded the long theme entirely on its own. From the start it is clear that the piano is not an accompanist but an equal partner in the dialogue.
- In the third movement (a fast, playful scherzo), the piano and violin toss short, flicked notes back and forth; whether the two instruments breathe together is what sets a great performance apart.
- Reviewing the piece, Saint-Saëns praised its new harmonies and bold changes of key (modulations). Listen for the moments when the melody slips into an unexpected key.
A song from around the time of his youth, when love lifted him up and then let him fall, it sings of the sorrow of waking from a beloved seen in a dream.
- The accompaniment, in which the piano evenly repeats the same chords, sounds like a quiet pulse within a dream.
- At the end, on the words 'Alas, sad awakening,' the melody climbs high and then falls as if collapsing. It is the point where all the song's emotion breaks forth at once.
- The arrangement for solo cello is as famous as the song itself, so it is worth listening to the vocal and cello versions side by side to compare how a song carries without its words.
IV. Composing as a breadwinner · 1877–1891 (age 32–46)
(Weimar) At the end of 1877, before the wound of the broken engagement had healed, he followed Saint-Saëns to Weimar and met Liszt. The story goes that when he showed him the score of his piano Ballade, the old master handed it back, saying it was too difficult. Afterward he traveled to Cologne, Munich and elsewhere to see Wagner's operas and was deeply moved, yet his own music never came to resemble Wagner's. (Marriage) In 1883 he married Marie, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. Their elder son, Emmanuel, was born that year, and their younger son, Philippe, in 1889. Emmanuel later became a biologist who studied protozoa and was elected to the Académie des Sciences; Philippe became a writer and edited and published his father's letters. The introverted Marie was often lonely beside a husband who was always out in the world. (Livelihood) His salary as choirmaster at the Madeleine was not enough to support the household, so he made the rounds of upper-class Parisian homes teaching piano and harmony. He could compose only during summer holidays. His publisher, Hamelle, bought up his works outright for a pittance. It was also around this time, in 1884, that he premiered a symphony and then withdrew it himself. (Loss) His father died in 1885, and his mother on the last day of 1887. He was at work on a Requiem (a Mass for the dead), and in January 1888 it was first performed at a funeral at the Madeleine. Fauré said the piece was not written for anyone in particular, but this music, coinciding with the loss of his parents, holds quiet consolation in place of the terror of judgment. The “Pavane,” written around the same time, was dedicated to his patron, the Comtesse Greffulhe.
A requiem written in a period when he lost both parents in quick succession, it looks upon death with peace rather than terror.
- The scene of the Last Judgment (the Dies irae), which most requiems paint so elaborately, is nearly absent here. Listening for what Fauré left out and what he kept is the key to understanding this work.
- “Pie Jesu” is a brief prayer sung by solo soprano with almost no accompaniment; performances by a boy chorister and by an adult soprano each have a flavor of their own.
- In the “Sanctus,” a solo violin floats high above the chorus, sounding like celestial light.
- In the final “In paradisum,” over the organ's gentle broken chords (arpeggios), the soprano sees the soul off to paradise. The way the piece fades quietly away without a grand close is an ending true to Fauré.
Dedicated to his patron, the Comtesse Greffulhe, in years when he was hard-pressed to earn a living, the piece borrows the steps of an old court dance to paint an elegant melancholy.
- Over a string accompaniment plucked with the fingers (pizzicato), the flute sings the theme. This simple pairing is the face of the piece.
- The pavane is a slow processional dance of the 16th-century court. Tempos vary widely from performer to performer, so it is worth comparing those who play it as a slow lament with those who play it as a lightly walking dance.
- Some versions add a chorus, and since its text mocks the crossed paths of lovers, it sets up a curious contrast with the elegance of the music.
V. Salons and the lectern · 1891–1905 (age 46–60)
(Venice) In 1891, at the invitation of his patron Winnaretta Singer, daughter of a sewing-machine magnate, he stayed in Venice and wrote songs on poems by Verlaine. The patrons of the Paris salons gave him room to breathe beyond the struggle to make a living. (Inspection) In 1892 he became an inspector of provincial conservatories, crisscrossing France by train. It was a steady income but a grueling round of travel, and from the road he wrote to his wife almost every day. (Emma) Around this time he grew close to Emma Bardac, a banker's wife and an amateur singer. The song cycle “La bonne chanson,” written for her, is steeped in the excitement of those years. The little piano duets he wrote for each birthday of her young daughter Hélène, nicknamed Dolly, were gathered into the “Dolly Suite.” Emma later became Debussy's wife. (Professor) In 1896 he became chief organist at the Madeleine and succeeded Massenet as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Ravel, Koechlin, Enescu, Florent Schmitt and Nadia Boulanger all passed through his class. He never imposed his own methods on his students, and Ravel dedicated “Jeux d'eau” 'to my dear master Gabriel Fauré.' (Pelléas) In 1898 he wrote the incidental music for a London production of Maeterlinck's play “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Short on time, he handed part of the orchestration to his student Koechlin. From around 1900 he began a relationship with the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans that lasted to the end of his life. In 1903, the year he took up music criticism for “Le Figaro,” he began to notice strange symptoms in his hearing.
Incidental music dashed off for a London play just as he was settling in as a professor, with his student Koechlin lending a hand in the orchestration.
- In “La fileuse,” the restless, rapidly whirling figure in the strings sounds like a turning spinning wheel, while above it the oboe sings the melody.
- The “Sicilienne,” with its swaying rhythm passed back and forth between flute and harp, is the most widely loved movement.
- The final “Mort de Mélisande” is a heavy funeral march; like the Requiem, it chooses quiet sorrow over anguished cries.
VI. Director of the Conservatoire · 1905–1920 (age 60–75)
(Ravel) In 1905, when his student Ravel was eliminated in the preliminary round of the Prix de Rome, the Paris musical world was in an uproar. Amid charges that the jury had failed an already recognized composer, the director, Dubois, stepped down, and the government installed Fauré in his place. He was a sixty-year-old director who had never had a formal conservatory education. (Reform) He put an end to faculty appointments made through connections and broadened the curriculum to span everything from Renaissance music to the music of his own day. Professors who resisted left, and the mild-mannered Fauré earned the nickname 'Robespierre.' In 1909, when his students broke away from the conservative Société Nationale de Musique to found the Société Musicale Indépendante, he became its president. That same year he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. (Ease) The director's salary freed him from money worries for the first time. In summer he stayed by Swiss lakes and wrote the opera “Pénélope.” It premiered in Monte Carlo in 1913 and was then staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, but it was soon buried by the uproar over “The Rite of Spring” at the same theater a few weeks later and by the theater's financial troubles. (Hearing loss) His hearing kept deteriorating. It was not simply that sounds grew fainter: high notes came to him distorted lower, and low notes higher. He struggled to hide this at meetings and concerts, and in letters to his wife he confided the anguish of being unable to hear his own music properly. (War) When war broke out in 1914 he was staying at a German spa, and he barely made it home by way of Switzerland. In the Violin Sonata No. 2 and the Cello Sonata No. 1, written during the war, the gentleness of his youth gave way to a hard, sharp-edged voice.
VII. The last quartet · 1920–1924 (age 75–79)
(Retirement) In 1920, at seventy-five, Fauré stepped down as director of the Conservatoire because of his hearing and his health. The state awarded him the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, and in 1922 an official concert in his honor was held at the Sorbonne. But with his fixed income reduced, money was tight once more, and years of smoking had weakened his airways. (Farewell) In December 1921 Saint-Saëns died in Algiers. He had been Fauré's teacher since Fauré was sixteen and his friend for sixty years. In old age Saint-Saëns could not quite follow his pupil's late music, but their letters stayed affectionate to the end. (Late works) Even so, these final years were the most fruitful of his life. One after another came the song cycle “L'horizon chimérique,” which sings of a dream of setting out to sea, the Piano Quintet No. 2, the Nocturne No. 13 and the Piano Trio. Written with ears that could barely hear, these pieces were clear, austere music, stripped of ornament down to line and harmony alone. (Quartet) Last of all he took up the string quartet, which he had avoided all his life. It was a genre over which Beethoven cast too long a shadow. He completed it in September 1924 but never heard it himself, leaving the question of publication to students such as Roger-Ducasse. (Eternal rest) On November 4, 1924, he died of pneumonia at his home in Paris. A state funeral was held at the Madeleine, and his Requiem was performed. Before he died, he is said to have told his two sons, in so many words, not to grieve if his music were forgotten. He was buried in Passy Cemetery.
His last work, completed in the final year of his life with ears that could barely hear, and left behind without his ever hearing it.
- The opening theme of the first movement is said to come from a violin concerto he began and abandoned in his youth. At the end of his life, in other words, he returned to a melody of his younger days.
- In the first movement the viola is the first to bring out the theme; listen to this choice of a dark middle-register voice over the brilliant violin.
- In the slow second movement the four instruments interweave almost in a whisper, so that it sounds like someone talking to themselves. It is the quintessence of late Fauré, with ornament gone and only line remaining.
- The final movement brightens a little but never grows exuberant. It is just like him not to end his last work with a triumphant finale.
Lesser-known stories
For a long time it was little known that the large-orchestra version of the Requiem, the one most often performed today, stands at some distance from Fauré's original conception. The version first performed in 1888 was a small ensemble that left out the violins and centered on violas, cellos, harp and organ, with a violin used only for the solo in the “Sanctus.” Scholars believe the large-orchestra version, issued in 1900 at the publisher's request, was made with a student's help. In the 1980s, as Jean-Michel Nectoux and John Rutter each revived the small-ensemble version, the dark, intimate sound Fauré had first heard began to be performed again. Belying his image as a solemn church musician, he also had a playful streak. In the 1880s, together with his student and friend Messager, he concocted “Souvenirs de Bayreuth,” a piano duet that twisted melodies from Wagner's “Der Ring des Nibelungen” into dance tunes, and the two would play it at gatherings. He could admire Wagner deeply and still poke fun at the fervor around him; regarded as a private amusement, the piece was published only after his death. That his hearing loss was not merely a decline in acuity but a distortion of pitch is confirmed chiefly by his letters to his wife. He confided that high and low notes sounded warped, so that his own music felt like noise. These letters were widely read only after his second son, Philippe, published them as a collection in 1951; until then, almost nothing was known of how much of this torment he had concealed throughout his years as director of the Conservatoire.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Mode
(Literally) Seonbeop (旋法) means 'the method (法) of making melody (旋).' The Western name, mode, comes from the Latin modus, meaning a manner or a mold. (In music) A mode is one of the various scale patterns that arise from how the intervals between a scale's notes are arranged. The major and minor keys so familiar today are themselves kinds of mode, but medieval church music had many others, such as the Dorian and the Phrygian. Even using only the white keys of a piano, starting on 'C' sounds like a bright major key, while starting on 'D' sounds strangely like an old song. The material is the same and only the starting point has changed, yet the feeling shifts, and that is the difference between modes. (Elsewhere) The word mode is commonly used for a way of operating, as in 'hard mode' in a game or 'airplane mode' on a phone.
Modulation
(Literally) Jeonjo (轉調) means 'changing (轉) the key (調).' (In music) Modulation is the shift, partway through a piece, of its central note, that is, the tonic, and its key to a different one. Singing the last chorus a step higher at karaoke is the simplest example. Fauré made these shifts so smoothly and in such unexpected directions that listeners find themselves inside a different color without knowing when the change happened. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, the expression 'jo-reul bakkunda' ('to change the key') is rarely used outside music, and a sudden change of mood is not figuratively called 'jeonjo' either. The jeonjo (前兆) of the common phrase 'jeonjo jeungsang' ('warning symptoms') means an omen that appears in advance, a separate word written with different Hanja.
Requiem
(Literally) Requiem is Latin for 'rest.' The first word of the Mass's opening prayer, 'Grant them eternal rest, O Lord (Requiem aeternam),' became the name of the work. (In music) A requiem is the Mass offered for the dead in the Catholic Church, or music set to the texts of that Mass. The prescribed prayers are sung in order, but composers differ in which sections they include or leave out. The Requiems of Mozart and Verdi depict the terror of the Last Judgment on a grand scale, but Fauré left that part almost entirely out and put consolation and peace first. Just as, when someone loses a friend, one person weeps with them and another quietly holds their hand, the same prayers can offer entirely different kinds of comfort. (Elsewhere) In the title of a film or novel, 'a requiem for something' is a figure of speech for a work that mourns what has vanished.
Pavane
(Literally) The roots of the name are unclear. One theory traces it to the Italian city of Padua, another to the stately gait of the peacock (pavo). (In music) The pavane is a slow, stately processional dance of the 16th-century European courts, or music for that dance. People walked slowly in lines to a steady step in duple meter. Picture walking in, one slow step at a time, to the processional music at a graduation, and you are close to the feeling. French composers such as Fauré and Ravel borrowed the name of this old dance for pieces of elegant, melancholy character.
Incidental music
(Literally) Busu (附隨) means 'attaching (附) and following along (隨).' In other words, music that comes attached to a play. (In music) Incidental music is written for a stage play: for the intervals between acts, scene changes, songs within the drama and the like. Unlike in opera, the actors perform in spoken dialogue, and the music supports the atmosphere from the side. Think of the background music that plays when the scene changes in a school play. After the run, the best passages are often gathered into an orchestral suite to be played separately in concert, as with Fauré's “Pelléas et Mélisande” suite. (Elsewhere) In film, music serving the same role is called film music or background music.
String quartet
(Literally) Sajungju (四重奏) means 'four (四) people playing (奏) in layers (重).' (In music) A string quartet is an ensemble of two violins, a viola and a cello playing together, or a piece written for that ensemble. With no conductor, the four players must keep together through glances and breathing, so it is regarded as the most refined and intimate of chamber genres. After Haydn established its form and Beethoven deepened it, composers came to treat the genre as a kind of proving ground for their skill. As in a group project for a team of four, if any one member stands out or drops out, the whole thing collapses. It was that very weight that kept Fauré away from the genre all his life, until he finally wrote one in his last year.