November 2024 marked the centenary of the death of the French composer, Gabriel Fauré. The man was something of an enigma, largely regarded as easy-going and friendly, but essentially a recluse. He preferred his own company, despite a broken engagement, a marriage and several children. He spent days and sometimes weeks away from home, composing in out of the way hotels and country inns. When riled, he could become quite the martinet. During his 15-year reign as director of the Paris Conservatoire he became so contemptuous of that institute’s preference for what he called ‘operatic politics’ as opposed to sound musical education, that he adopted such stringent measures the staff gave him the nickname Robespierre after the dictatorial leader of the French Revolution.

Born in the foothills of the Pyrenees in 1845, the sixth son of a school inspector, he was farmed out as a child to a nearby family as the Fauré family home was overcrowded. Little is known of his early encounters with music, but when he was 11, he was spotted by the Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer, who had been lured to Paris by Rossini, and who was apparently so impressed with the boy that he offered him a scholarship at his school. When he was 15, he acquired Camille Saint-Saens as a teacher, the latter being only 10 years his senior. Like many French composers, Fauré’s first jobs were as an organist. Firstly in Brittany, from where he was sacked after four years for turning up at church one Sunday morning in full evening dress, straight from a late night early morning party. Returning to Paris he became second organist to Charles-Marie Widor at Saint-Sulpice before moving on to the Madeleine as choirmaster, following the recently departed Saint-Saens.
Throughout all this time he seems to have composed very little. His first appearance as a composer had been in 1865, aged 20, with a group of songs, and it was in this field that he was to make his greatest fame. The beauty of his songs was to earn him the title of the ‘French Schumann’ and the French music critic Emile Vuillermoz, himself once a pupil of Fauré’s, said this of him: “He created an altogether modern, logical, well throughout style, never sacrificing to passing fashions, but steadily tending towards greater security and simplicity. The easy grace of his art is deceptive; never did a creative artist present us with subtler and more powerful achievements.”
By the 1890s the game of musical chairs in Paris was at its height. When the French composer Ernest Guiraud died in 1891, Fauré was named his successor as Inspector of the music conservatoires in the French provinces. Four years later Théodore Dubois moved from the post of organist at the Madeleine to take the directorship of the Paris Conservatoire following the death of Ambroise Thomas. Faure succeeded him as organist and was at last admitted as a teacher to the Conservatoire, a move which Thomas had vehemently opposed while he was alive, believing Fauré to be ‘too modern’. Finally, in 1905 he succeeded Dubois as director where he remained for the next 15 years, becoming increasingly deaf as the years went by. In 1920, at the age of 75, he retired from the Conservatoire, whereupon he was given the Grand Cross of the Legion d’Honneur, a rare honour for a musician. The French President held a special concert of his works in his honour. One local paper, reporting on the event, wrote: “It was a poignant spectacle, indeed: that of a man present at a concert of his own works and able to hear not a single note. He sat gazing before him pensively, despite everything, grateful and content.” Due in part to a lifetime of heavy smoking, Fauré died of pneumonia on 4 November 1924, and was given a state funeral at his old church, the Madeleine.
– Michael Mortons-Evans
This article was published in the November 2024 issue of Fine music Magazine.