Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré is unique among French composers of the late 19th century in that his most important work is nearly all chamber music, songs with piano, and solo piano music. Even his best-known large-scale work, the Requiem (1887–90), was originally composed with chamber orchestra and organ. This intimacy of scale and temperament goes with a highly personal melodic and harmonic style, to some extent shaped by his study of plainchant and polyphonic music at the École Niedermeyer.

Early Years: An Unknown Organist

Fauré was born in Pamiers, in southwestern France, but came to Paris when he was nine in order to enter the École Niedermeyer, with a view to training as an organist and church choirmaster. In due course he went to Rennes as organist at the Church of Saint Sauveur, and later, in Paris, was choirmaster and (from 1896) organist at La Madeleine. But these posts, typical of the way French musical life worked, were merely the support system for his composing, which, for many years, earned him very little money and even, at first, not much fame. Apart from church music (including the Cantique de Jean Racine, which won him a first prize at the École in 1865) and some piano pieces, his first completed works of any significance were chamber music: the A-major Violin Sonata (1875–76) and the C-minor Piano Quartet (1876–79), the latter perhaps prompted by Saint-Saëns’s recent B-flat Piano Quartet—a genre hitherto rare in France.

Fauré: Quartet No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 15

Middle Period: A Pioneer of Melody and Harmony

In the late 1870s, Fauré traveled. He visited Liszt in Weimar and showed him his Ballade for piano (1877–79), an arduous and awkward piece that Liszt, perhaps disingenuously, claimed was too hard to play. He heard works by Wagner in Cologne and Munich, and, like so many French composers of the day, was intrigued; but unlike many of them, never seems to have been tempted to emulate. Of his two (much later) operas, Prométhée (1900), written for open-air performance and some 800 performers, uses leitmotifs—Wagner’s thematic labels— but has too much dialogue to be thought of as Wagnerian, and Pénélope (1907–12), while also using motives and being through-composed, is remote from Wagner in scale and discourse.

Fauré also composed a quantity of incidental music, including for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1898) and, towards the end of his life, René Fauchois’s Masques et bergamasques (1919). But it was in his many songs of the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in his song cycle La bonne chanson (1892–4), to verses by Paul Verlaine, that he evolved the highly personal style of melody and harmony that fed into his later chamber music and piano nocturnes and barcarolles. In essence this is a top-down style in which the melody directs the harmony, as opposed to classical theory (from Bach onwards), in which the harmony is led by the bass line. Fauré’s thinking probably originated in his study of Gregorian chant—a kind of melody based on church modes (Dorian, Phrygian, etc.) that doesn’t lend itself to tonal harmonizing, but, when applied to music in many parts, can produce strange and unpredictable results.

This is at once apparent in the first movement of his second Piano Quartet, in G minor (1885–6), whose melodic lines dart around as if trying to evade the harmony, and also in the first movement of the first Piano Quintet, in D minor, begun in 1887, though not completed until 1905. (The Requiem, begun in the same year, is more sedate in this respect, perhaps because Fauré was conscious that he was writing for amateur singers.) Thereafter his style becomes increasingly complex, sometimes seeming to approach atonality, though always within a tonal context defined by keynotes and more or less conclusive cadence endings—harmonic full stops.

Fauré: Quartet No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 45

In 1892 Fauré, who had never studied at a conservatory, was made Inspector of Provincial Conservatoires, and then, in 1896 (the year of his appointment as La Madeleine’s organist), he took over Massenet’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire. Suddenly this rather self-effacing composer had become a figure in the exclusive world of official Parisian music. The climax of this process came in 1905, when he was elevated to the directorship of that august institution which he had never entered as a student. The appointment brought him a certain fame beyond the walls of the Conservatoire, both socially and professionally, in the sense that his music began to be more widely performed. But it left him comparatively little time for composition, and from that year until the outbreak of war in August 1914, apart from Pénélope, he completed only songs (including the cycle La chanson d’Eve) and a series of solo piano pieces, including the Nine Preludes, Op.103 (1909–10), Nocturnes Nos. 9–11 (1908–13), and Barcarolles Nos. 7–11 (1905–13).

Late Period: Moving Towards Complexity

During these years he also traveled a good deal: a concert tour of Russia in 1910 and regular trips to Switzerland and Italy to compose. But the war confined him to Paris, and though he was still running the Conservatoire and instituting reforms, not all of which were popular with his colleagues, he was able to concentrate on more extended projects, specifically the second Violin Sonata, in E minor (1916), and the first Cello Sonata, in D minor (1917), as well as the song cycle Le jardin clos (1914) and, at the end of the war, the Fantaisie (1918)—his sole surviving concertante work for piano and orchestra. The sonatas are notable for their sheer energy, and for their extreme harmonic and contrapuntal freedom; Fauré’s instrumental writing has by this time developed an extraordinary feeling of intense, intimate conversation and an irresistible tendency to move in a short time from simple statement to complex argument. These are not relaxed chamber works in the domestic tradition, but profoundly worked successors to late Beethoven.

After the war there were more chamber works in this vein: a second Piano Quintet, in C minor (1919–21), and a second Cello Sonata, in G minor (1921), as well as two further song collections, Mirages (1919) and L’horizon chimérique (1921). His one and only Piano Trio, in D minor (1922–23), is more lyrical in the character of its material but deceptively intricate in its working. Finally, he composed a String Quartet, in E minor (1923–24), his only chamber work without piano and, perhaps for that reason, still more concentrated and intellectually self-absorbed.

Fauré: Trio in D minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 120

Watching and Listening

The inward quality of Fauré’s chamber music can give a misleading impression of his personality. Though married (in 1883 to Marie Fremier, a sculptor’s daughter) with two sons, he was notoriously unfaithful and, after his Conservatoire appointments, a familiar figure in the salons. Marcel Proust knew him, loved his music, and perhaps modeled aspects of the music of his fictional composer Vinteuil (in À la recherche du temps perdu) on it. One might even sense parallels with Proust’s elaborate style in Faure’s late chamber music. In this respect, it’s worth listening through whole movements of, for instance, the first Cello Sonata or the second Piano Quintet to get the feel of his natural tendency to complicate from simple beginnings. It’s a fascinating and often beautiful process.

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