Gabriel Faure

Gabriel Urbain Faure was born on May 12, 1845, in Pamiers, a small town in the Ariege department of southern France, the youngest of six children of Toussaint-Honore Faure, a schoolmaster, and Marie-Antoinette-Helene Lalene-Laprade ^[1]. The family was respectable but not wealthy, and nothing in its background suggested a musical career. The boy spent his first years with a foster nurse in a nearby village, a common arrangement at the time, before rejoining his family when his father was appointed director of a teacher training college at Montgauzy, near Foix ^[1].

The college chapel had a harmonium, and the young Faure taught himself to play it. An elderly blind woman who heard him improvising reportedly urged his father to take the child's gift seriously. In 1854, on the advice of a government official who had heard the nine-year-old play, Toussaint-Honore enrolled his son at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris, a boarding school founded by the Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer to train church musicians ^[2]. Faure would remain there for eleven years, supported by a scholarship.

The Niedermeyer school shaped him in ways the Paris Conservatoire could not have. Its curriculum centered on plainchant, Renaissance polyphony and the church modes, a grounding that later gave Faure's harmony its distinctive modal color ^[2]. After Niedermeyer's death in 1861, the piano class passed to Camille Saint-Saens, then only twenty-five, who introduced his pupils to the forbidden moderns: Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Saint-Saens became Faure's lifelong friend, champion and correspondent ^[1]. Faure left the school in 1865 with prizes in piano, organ, harmony and composition, and with his first published work, the choral setting Cantique de Jean Racine, already behind him.

Faure's early career was that of a working church musician rather than a celebrated composer. His first post, from 1866, was as organist at the church of Saint-Sauveur in Rennes, in Brittany, a position he found provincial and dull; he was eventually dismissed after appearing at Sunday Mass still dressed in evening clothes from a ball the night before ^[1]. He returned to Paris in 1870, shortly before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served as a volunteer messenger and saw action around the besieged capital ^[3].

After the war he held a series of organ posts, at Saint-Honore d'Eylau, at Saint-Sulpice as assistant, and from 1874 as deputy to Saint-Saens at the Madeleine, one of the most prestigious churches in Paris. In 1877 he became choirmaster there, and in 1896 chief organist ^[1]. Church work paid the bills but consumed his time; for most of his life Faure could compose only during summer holidays, a constraint that helps explain his relatively compact catalogue ^[3].

In 1871 he joined Saint-Saens and others in founding the Societe Nationale de Musique, created to promote new French instrumental music after the national humiliation of the war ^[2]. The society premiered many of Faure's works, and its concerts gave him his first real audience. His Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, introduced in 1877, announced a distinctive voice: classical in outline, yet harmonically supple and melodically generous. Through the salons of Pauline Viardot and later Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac, Faure gained the patrons and performers a composer without an opera career needed in nineteenth-century Paris ^[3].

Any account of Gabriel Faure achievements must begin with the Requiem in D minor, composed and revised between 1887 and 1900. Faure deliberately departed from the theatrical terror of Berlioz and Verdi, omitting most of the Dies irae text and adding the gentle In Paradisum; he described his conception of death as a happy deliverance rather than a fearful passage ^[2]. First performed at the Madeleine in 1888, the Requiem grew through several versions from an intimate chamber scoring to full orchestra, and it remains his most widely performed work ^[4].

Faure was arguably the greatest master of the French art song, the melodie. Across six decades he composed more than a hundred songs, from early charmers such as Apres un reve to the mature cycles La bonne chanson (1894), on poems by Paul Verlaine, and the late, austere L'horizon chimerique (1921) ^[3]. His piano music, thirteen nocturnes, thirteen barcarolles, and the popular Dolly suite for piano duet among it, extended Chopin's forms into a new harmonic world. In chamber music he produced two piano quartets, two piano quintets, two cello sonatas, a piano trio and a late string quartet, a body of work central to the French repertoire ^[4].

His institutional achievements were equally consequential. Appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1896, he taught Maurice Ravel, Georges Enescu, Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger ^[2]. In 1905, following the scandal over Ravel's repeated exclusion from the Prix de Rome, Faure was named director of the Conservatoire. The outsider who had never studied there reformed its curriculum, broadened its repertoire and enforced anonymous entrance examinations, earning from resistant staff the nickname Robespierre ^[1]. He held the post until 1920. He also served for decades as a music critic for the newspaper Le Figaro, and in 1909 was elected to the Institut de France ^[3].

Faure's private life had its share of turbulence beneath a composed surface. In the 1870s he was engaged to Marianne Viardot, daughter of the singer Pauline Viardot, but she broke off the engagement in 1877, a blow that affected him deeply ^[1]. In 1883 he married Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. The marriage produced two sons, Emmanuel, who became a noted biologist, and Philippe, a writer, but it settled into a distant companionship sustained largely by letters, since Marie rarely left home while her husband traveled and socialized ^[3].

Faure formed close attachments to other women during the marriage, most notably a long liaison with the singer Emma Bardac in the 1890s, for whose daughter he wrote the Dolly suite, and later a lasting relationship with the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, who was his companion from about 1900 until his death ^[1]. Contemporaries described him as charming, unassuming and quietly witty, a man whose gentle manner concealed both ambition and periods of depression, which he called spleen ^[3].

For most of his career money was tight. Church posts, teaching and inspection tours of provincial conservatories left him little leisure, and real financial security came only late, with the Conservatoire directorship and growing publication income ^[2]. He never sought the limelight of the opera house, though his lyric tragedy Penelope (1913) won critical admiration, and he seemed content to let the music make its case without publicity.

From around 1903 Faure developed a cruel affliction for a musician: progressive hearing loss accompanied by distortion, in which high and low pitches sounded out of tune while the middle register remained clear ^[1]. He concealed the condition for years, fearing for his position at the Conservatoire, and confided it mainly to his wife in letters. Remarkably, the deafness coincided with a late creative flowering rather than a decline ^[4].

The works of his final two decades are sparer, more inward and harmonically more daring than anything before: the song cycles La chanson d'Eve and Le jardin clos, the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, the Second Piano Quintet (1921), the Piano Trio (1923) and the String Quartet, completed only weeks before his death and the only work he ever wrote for that medium ^[4]. Penelope, premiered in Monte Carlo and Paris in 1913, distilled his mature style into the theater.

Faure retired from the Conservatoire in 1920, aged seventy-five, and in the same year received the Grand-Croix of the Legion d'honneur, an honor rarely given to a musician ^[2]. In 1922 a national tribute at the Sorbonne, attended by the President of the Republic, celebrated him with performances by leading artists. Weakened by years of heavy smoking and declining health, he died of pneumonia in Paris on November 4, 1924. France gave him a state funeral at the Madeleine, the church he had served for so long, and he was buried in the Passy Cemetery ^[1].

Faure occupies a hinge position in music history. He inherited the French tradition of clarity and proportion from Saint-Saens and passed forward, through his pupils and his own late works, a harmonic freedom that fed directly into twentieth-century modernism ^[2]. Ravel dedicated his String Quartet to him; Nadia Boulanger, who carried his ideals into her teaching of Aaron Copland and many others, kept his memory active for another half century. Aaron Copland himself, in a 1924 essay, presented Faure to American readers as an unjustly neglected master ^[5].

His reputation outside France grew slowly, partly because his art avoids rhetorical display and reveals itself only on close listening. The Requiem, Pavane, Sicilienne and the Cantique de Jean Racine eventually became international staples, while pianists, singers and chamber musicians came to treat his catalogue as essential repertoire ^[4]. Scholars such as Jean-Michel Nectoux, whose documentary biography remains the standard study, and Robert Orledge in Britain, established Faure studies as a serious field in the later twentieth century ^[3].

Among basic Gabriel Faure facts, one stands out for students of any Gabriel Faure biography: he achieved his influence without symphonies, without a career in grand opera, and largely without official favor until late in life. He renewed French music through songs, chamber works, sacred music and the classroom. A century after his death his idiom, poised between restraint and sensuous harmony, still defines for many listeners what French music sounds like ^[2].