Gabriel Fauré - Biography
Gabriel Faure was born in Parmiers, Ariege France on May 12th 1845 and died in Paris on November 4th 1924. He was the son of an elementary school teacher. Since Faure was the sixth child of a poor man he was in foster care for the first four years of his life. When he returned to his family he somehow managed to absorb the rudiments of musical knowledge. He went to the Eccole Niedermeyer in Paris a music school less famous then the Paris Conservatoire buy still a first rate musical school that also odder a general academic education. He started at the school at ten and the school was so impressed with him that they paid his tuition. When he was fifteen he met Camille St. Saens who had joined the school as a young instructor and who was to become a major influence and a lifelong friend. By the time he was twenty he wrote at least twenty songs of considerable stature to texts by Hugo and surprisingly the radical Baudelaire, he also composed his first published piano work Three Romances without Words. Upon graduation his first position was as organist at the Church of Saint –Sauveur in Rennes where he was to stay for four years until 1870 until he was fired for what was felt was his lack of piety and missing an occasional nightly mass. He moved on to be an organist in Paris but with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war later that year he was drafted into the army. After the collapse of the French army the following year he returned to his role of church organist eventually becoming the assistant to the great Charles Marie Widor at the famed church of Saint-Surplice in Paris. He now entered the circle of famed singer and Paris artistic salon figure Pauline Viardot- Garcia. He fell in love with her daughter, but his lack of income and prestige doomed any chance for marriage. In the late 1870’s he visited Saint- Saens friend Liszt in Weimar and visited other German cities and became acquainted with the operas of Wagner. While impressed with Wagner he felt this was not the way for him and decided to create a uniquely French art.
His first standard repertoire work was his First Violin Sonata in A (1876) that was soon to be followed by the well known First Piano Quartet. Faure was to marry in 1883 Marie Fremiet the daughter of a well known sculptress this seems to have been a practical marriage rather than a love match. Faure was seemingly not comfortable with large orchestral forms after an abandoned attempt to write a symphony he was to compose his best known work Requiem composed in his father’s memory. This work has gained great popularity in part because of its omission of the central part of the Catholic service Dies Irae( Day of Wrath) which describes the terror of Judgment Day and concentrates on the comforting texts of the Mass.
His primary mode of composition for the first forty five years of his life was the song called Chanson in French. He had already published more than 50 of them many were probably destroyed by the self critical Faure, besides the poets already mentioned he had a penchant for his contemporary Paul Verlaine whose texts he used in the Five Songs Op. 58 and the well known cycle La Bonne Chanson Op. 61.
Faure as he reached the age of fifty had considerable respect from his colleagues and the more enlightened musical public but couldn’t match the fame of his contemporary Jules Massenet because the French public loved operatic spectacle which Faure by nature couldn’t provide. He did eventually write a large scale stage work Promethee in 1903 and a lovely lyrical opera Penelope in 1912 but both had limited success. During the 1880’s and 90’s he wrote the well known orchestral piece Pavane the incidental music to Pelleas et Melisande. Among the piano works for this period are the first of the Barcaroles, Impromptu’s and Nocturnes and the Dolly Suite for 4 hand piano and a Piano Quartet in G minor. In 1896 he was given a long over do professorship of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. By 1905 he had become the director of the Conservatoire but with much opposition because he not a graduate and was not a stickler for academic rules, five years later was elected to the Legion of Honor. By the 1910’s he had started to develop a hearing lose but still continued to produce masterful works like the later piano Barcarolles and Nocturnes ,a Violin Sonata in E minor, two Cello Sonatas and more songs; La Chanson Eve, Le Jardin Clos, Mirages and finally the cycle L’Horizon Chimeriquein 1922.
Faure by 1920 was in poor health and increasingly more deaf, he resigned his position at the Conservatoire and received more national honors. Though formally retired he was still to produce a String Quartet(1924), Piano Trio (1923), and a Piano Quintet in C (1921) along with one orchestral work, Suite Bergamasques. Faure died a quiet death on the Fourth of November at the age of 79.
Faure as can be seen from the information we have offered is a gentle master and not cast in the heroic mold of a Brahms or Wagner. He has a particular French lucidity and reserve that eschews extremes in emotion. Some of his music like the Requiem or the Pavane has a quiet sensuality which commends itself to the general listener. His chamber music, piano music and songs are too cultivated and seemingly without outward event to attract the general listener. Invariably most of the recorded performances on record are by French musicians or French speaking ones from Switzerland and Belgium (the one exception was Arthur Rubinstein). Faure offers a limited musical world but within that world he cultivated a sort of perfection.