The work of the imagination consists of attempting to formulate all that one wants that is best, everything that goes beyond reality,’ Fauré wrote to his son Philippe, in August 1908. ‘To my mind art, and above all music, consists of lifting us as far as possible above what is.’ His words have been much quoted, as reminders of his apparent idealism, of a belief that music should transcend the temporal and the mundane. The suggestion of other-worldliness accords with a prevalent view of Fauré as a composer whose most familiar works – Requiem, Pavane, Élégie, Cantique de Jean Racine, First Violin Sonata, Pelléas et Mélisande, songs such as Après un rêve and Clair de lune – aspire to an almost timeless beauty, expressed in musical language of exquisite refinement.

Such a view, however, is limiting, as Fauré was an extraordinarily complex figure, both as a musician and as a man. Sometimes described, even by his biographers, as ‘reticent’ or ‘enigmatic’, he was actually something of a pioneer, and is historically central to the consolidation and development of French chamber music and song in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His output taken as a whole is also much darker than is sometimes thought. The American critic Harold C Schonberg considered him ‘one of the most delicate and subtle of composers’ – accurate with regard to his subtlety, but ignoring the violence that surfaces in his music: we hear it, for instance, in his Second Piano Quartet (1885-86), in his stage works and in some of the later piano nocturnes and barcarolles.

The strain of melancholy that runs through his work, meanwhile, was symptomatic of the depression from which he is known to have suffered intermittently throughout his life: its history is shadowy and its pathological cause uncertain, but it colours his output from beginning to end. Marcel Proust, who loved his music, fully understood its emotional resonances, and in Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921) he notably described the First Violin Sonata as ‘inquiet, tourmenté’ (‘anxious, tormented’), which it is.

Fauré’s stylistic development has puzzled many. The works that have primarily kept him in the repertory since his death date mostly from the earlier part of his career and give us by and large the elegant, fin de siècle Fauré of popular imaginings. But as time went by, his music became more astringent and elliptic, his counterpoint more rigorous, his melodic and harmonic language leaner and more dissonant. His style took on elements now identified as modernist or neoclassical, though he remained distant from Stravinsky’s rhythmic ferocity and Schoenbergian atonality. For decades, late Fauré was consequently deemed obscure, and some of his early interpreters didn’t always help. The pianist Marguerite Long, for instance, set herself up during his lifetime, much to his annoyance, as the effective high priestess of his music, yet shied away from playing his late works, which have only recently begun to gain ground. There are still areas of his output that need reappraisal, his stage works above all.

A Religious Occasion

Fauré’s musical education took place not at the Paris Conservatoire, like that of many of his contemporaries, but at the École Niedermeyer, essentially a religious establishment dedicated to training organists and choirmasters. Fauré was a pupil from the age of nine. Louis Niedermeyer, the school’s Swiss-born founder, deemed contemporary music irrelevant. The curriculum focused instead on early music, and Fauré’s education, and ultimately his style, was in part grounded in the works of Palestrina, Victoria and Bach, as well as the modes of medieval music and plainsong. Modal inflections are apparent even in his earliest works, and much of his supposedly abstruse late style derives from its at times unsettling harmonic and melodic oscillations between tonality and modality.

Fauré (foreground, at the piano) leads a musical society lecture in 1910 (photography: Universal History Archive - UIG - Bridgeman Images)

In 1861, however, following Niedermeyer’s death, Saint-Saëns joined the teaching staff and turned his pupils’ world upside down by introducing them to hitherto prohibited music by Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner. The impact was profound. Fauré’s melodic expressiveness and refinement owe much to Schumann and Chopin, and his piano works, particularly the nocturnes and barcarolles that occupied him throughout his career, effectively take Chopin’s high Romanticism progressively into territory at once austere, troubling and new. Fauré and Saint-Saëns became lifelong friends until the latter’s death in 1921, a friendship unaffected by Saint-Saëns’s infamous tetchiness, and his later dislike of some of Fauré’s music, notably the song-cycle La bonne chanson and his opera Pénélope. Meanwhile, Fauré found his voice while still a student, the choral Cantique de Jean Racine of 1865 being among the most beautiful pieces he was ever to write.

For much of his subsequent career, however, Fauré was rarely able to compose full-time, as financial constraints necessitated decades of work as organist, choirmaster and teacher, both privately and eventually at the Paris Conservatoire. Early on, there were church appointments at Rennes in Brittany, then at Clignancourt and St Sulpice in Paris. In 1874 he began deputising for Saint-Saëns at the organ of La Madeleine, Paris, and became the church’s choirmaster in 1877, remaining in that post until he was appointed organist in 1896. It was at La Madeleine that the Requiem, his best-known work, was first heard in 1888 at the funeral of Joseph Lesoufaché, a well‑known architect.

Much has been made of the Requiem’s supposed serenity, of the fact that Fauré avoids setting the Dies irae in its entirety, leaving only the Pie Jesu, effectively a simple song, at its centre as the emotional kernel, though the Day of Judgement is fiercely evoked in the Libera me and there is terrible bleakness in the hovering vocal writing at the start of the Offertoire. That it was composed for a liturgical setting, and is still used in that context, accounts for its smallness of scale compared with the vast ritual theatrics of Berlioz and Verdi. As in the case of a number of major works in Fauré’s output (the song-cycle La chanson d’Ève, the First Piano Quintet), the compositional process was evolutionary: a gradual gathering of individual movements, the last of its multiple versions completed as late as 1900.

Although the Requiem was begun after the death of his father in 1885, Fauré remained reticent as to his reasons for composing it, once saying it ‘wasn’t written for anything’, that it was written ‘for pleasure, if I may call it that’. His own religious beliefs, far from orthodox, teetered on agnosticism, according to his biographer Jean-Michel Nectoux. In 1922, a journalist remarked that he thought the Requiem was pagan rather than religious. ‘But pagan doesn’t necessarily mean irreligious!’ was Fauré’s comment. What is certain, however, is that the closing In paradisum with its oscillating arpeggios and slowly moving harmonies does indeed ‘go beyond reality’ and lift us ‘as far as possible above what is’.

The Sensualist

Fauré was an attractive man, and a great lover of women, and the vagaries of his emotional life inevitably influenced his work. Saint-Saëns, anxious to foster his talent, introduced him into the fashionable world of Parisian salons, and for some years in the 1870s, Fauré was associated with the circle around Pauline Viardot-García, with whose youngest daughter, Marianne, he fell violently in love. In July 1877, after a four-year courtship, the pair became engaged, though Marianne broke off the engagement in October, terrified as she was by the intensity of Fauré’s emotions. The outpourings of the First Violin Sonata, written in 1875 and dedicated to Marianne’s violinist brother Paul, testify to the volatility of his feelings for her, while Après un rêve and his first song-cycle Poème d’un jour record the sadness and anger he felt in the engagement’s aftermath.

Historical view of La Madeleine, where Fauré worked and his Requiem was first heard (photography: Look and Learn - Bridgeman Images)

It was another salon hostess, Marguerite Baugnies, who engineered Fauré’s eventual marriage, early in 1883, to Marie Fremiet, the daughter of a well-known sculptor and an aspiring painter herself. Their sons, Emmanuel (born in December the same year) and Philippe (born in 1889), both took the surname Fauré-Fremiet, and Philippe, a writer, later became Fauré’s first biographer. The couple gradually grew apart, however, and Fauré became a largely absent husband, as his emotional and inspirational world began to focus on a succession of affairs and mistresses. Marie failed to establish herself as an artist and became increasingly isolated and unhappy. ‘His silence crucified me,’ she once said. They communicated mostly by letter.

Marie never accompanied Fauré during the summer months when he composed at the houses of friends and admirers, or in rented villas or cottages. He sent her regular reports of his progress, however, which Philippe Fauré-Fremiet later edited for publication as his Lettres intimes (1951), and it is clear, on occasion, that Fauré expected Marie to derive her happiness and pleasure vicariously from the achievements of her husband and father. ‘Can you say what daughter and what wife’, he wrote shortly before he died, ‘was ever able to hear people talk, in the same day, of the pure beauty of her father’s works, of his loftily disinterested career, and of the pure beauty of her husband’s works, and his no less disinterested career?’

Fauré’s relationships beyond his marriage remain to some extent imperfectly documented. Unlike Debussy, he was discreet: there were no major scandals. But in 1898, Adela Maddison, the wife of one of his publishers, whom he met in London two years previously, walked out on her husband and children to live near him in Paris. And in 1900, Fauré met Marguerite Hasselmans, 31 years his junior, a pianist and the daughter of a professor of the harp at the conservatoire. He installed her in an apartment in Paris, effectively as his maîtresse en titre, and she remained his companion, socially as well as in private, until his death. Given his reputation, it is likely there were many affairs of which we know nothing at all.

The most significant of his liaisons, perhaps, was with Emma Bardac, then the wife of the Russian émigré banker Sigismond Bardac, whom she later left, amid a public outcry, for Debussy, becoming the latter’s second wife in 1908, after her divorce. In the 1890s, however, the Bardacs turned a blind eye to each other’s affairs, and Emma hosted a salon deemed avant-garde by many and was an amateur singer of considerable talent. We do not know exactly when she and Fauré became lovers: most commentators agree on the summer of 1892, though some, including Emma’s biographer Gillian Opstad, have argued they would have known each other well before that, as the Bardacs’ precociously gifted son Raoul (1881-1950) had been a private composition pupil of Fauré’s since early boyhood. In June 1892, Bardac gave birth to a daughter, Hélène, nicknamed Dolly, and some have argued that Fauré was her father. The evidence is inconclusive, though Fauré’s son Philippe is known to have addressed her as ‘ma petite soeur’. Fauré’s familiar Dolly Suite, for piano duet, was assembled from pieces written for her as new year or birthday presents.

Emma Bardac herself, meanwhile, was the inspiration for one of Fauré’s greatest works, La bonne chanson (1892-94), to texts by Paul Verlaine. Indeed, she could be considered its co-creator, as Fauré wrote, rewrote and revised many of the songs at her suggestion, and to the end of his life he regarded her as ‘the singer who was to remain its most moving interpreter’. Structurally and harmonically it broke new ground. Thematic repetition and development throughout its course led Ravel to describe it as symphonic. And its swerving chromatic extremism, new to Fauré’s output and horrifying its first audiences, captures the almost reckless rapture that he and Bardac clearly felt.

Sexuality, desire and gender were to constitute central themes in the song-cycles that followed over the years. La chanson d’Ève, completed in 1910, examines Eve’s sensual response to Eden before intimations of danger and thoughts of mortality intrude. The stripped-back musical language of Le jardin clos (1914), whose individual songs form an erotic dialogue between male and female protagonists, exposes a world in which the smallest sexual gesture speaks volumes, and arousal is experienced at the touch of a lover’s hand. Mirages, from 1919, the most beautiful of Fauré’s song-cycles, sets lesbian poetry by Renée de Brimont. Although it was written for the soprano Madeleine Grey, it has been sung and recorded more by men than by women, which robs it of multiple levels of meaning and ambiguity. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that Proust, profoundly aware of the myriad complexities of human sexuality, should have seen in Fauré something of a kindred spirit, despite the two men’s differences in orientation.

The Theatre

Fauré’s stage works remain relatively little known, though they form a major part of his output, and no assessment of his achievement can be considered complete without them, as in scope and scale they belie commonly held assumptions that he is essentially a miniaturist whose mastery lies primarily in short forms. He seems to have been initially wary of writing for the theatre, though. Opera was deemed the dominant musical form in 19th-century France, and there is little doubt that Fauré, along with composers as far apart as Saint-Saëns, Duparc, Franck and d’Indy, resented its prominence: the breaking of his engagement to Marianne Viardot may well have relieved him of pressure from the Viardot circle to write for the stage, allowing him to concentrate on the chamber works and songs that immediately followed.

Fauré and Marie – his long-suffering wife – in Prunay in 1889 (photography: akg images)

His first forays into the theatre came with incidental music, beginning with fanfares, dances and choruses for a production of Alexandre Dumas père’s Caligula at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1888. The score, its cool, classical beauty becoming increasingly tense as the emperor’s murder approaches, is remarkably atmospheric. Fauré soon received a second commission from the Odéon, for Shylock, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice by Edmond Haraucourt (first performed in 1889) for which he provided some exquisite interludes and songs. Nearly a decade elapsed, however, before he wrote the incidental music for the British premiere (in 1898) of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, a commission originally offered to Debussy, whose opera based on the play was as yet unperformed, and who turned it down flat. Fauré entrusted the orchestration to his pupil Charles Koechlin, though he subsequently revised the score himself when preparing the concert suite, the best known of his orchestral works.

One of his greatest successes in his own lifetime, however, came with the immense Prométhée, written for performance in 1900 at the Roman arena in Béziers, and paradoxically rarely heard since. It was composed at the suggestion of Saint-Saëns, following the success of his own Déjanire (the first of two related works with that title written by the composer) at Béziers two years previously; and like Saint-Saëns’s work, it was essentially a community project for actors, singers, multiple choirs and a vast number of instrumentalists, with more than four hundred performers in all at the premiere. Like Déjanire (an adaptation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis), it attempts the revival of Greek tragedy: the libretto, by Jean Lorrain and André-Ferdinand Hérold, aims, rather fancifully, to reconstruct a trilogy by Aeschylus, of which Prometheus Bound is the only extant play. The score, which Koechlin considered ‘a landmark’ in Fauré’s career, is harsh, violent, at times severe, and Wagnerian in its use of leitmotifs, though not in richness of sound, its asperity containing in embryo much of Fauré’s late style. Although Prométhée was heard at Béziers again in 1901, the forces required inevitably made revival difficult; a revised version for standard orchestra and chorus, however, was heard at the Paris Opéra in 1917. That it has never been recorded complete is to be regretted, though the excerpts we have – and a brave student performance from Brazil circulating on YouTube – reveal it to be remarkable.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that an opera would follow, and in 1907 Fauré began work on Pénélope (a three-act poème lyrique to a libretto by René Fauchois, based on Homer), which occupied him for the best part of six years. Given the nature of his marriage, it is striking that he chose as his subject a selfless wife waiting for her absent husband. As is the case with Prométhée, the methodology is Wagnerian, though the sound world, by turns sensual and austere, is uniquely Fauré’s own. The second act, dominated by a long, rather static duet for Pénélope and Ulysse (whom she as yet still does not recognise), carries overtones of Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde. That Fauré apparently found the music for Pénélope’s suitors difficult is undetectable from their sexually aggressive characterisations in the score. The beautiful closing chorus, after the couple’s eventual reunion, has something of the Requiem’s sublimity.

It was first heard in Monte Carlo in March 1913. The success it subsequently scored at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in early May was rapidly eclipsed by the furore surrounding the first performance of Le sacre du printemps at the same theatre later that month. Its revivals have been sporadic and usually dependent on the desire or willingness of well-known divas to tackle the demanding title-role. In Fauré’s lifetime, it was notably associated with the great Franco-Irish mezzo Claire Croiza. Subsequent interpreters have included Régine Crespin, Jessye Norman and Anna Caterina Antonacci.

Deafness

In the summer of 1903, while working on the First Piano Quintet, which had occupied him on and off since 1887, Fauré began to experience problems with his hearing. It was a question not just of hearing loss but of pitch distortion. ‘He heard bass notes a third higher and treble notes a third lower,’ Fauré-Fremiet tells us. Notes and phrases in the middle register, meanwhile, began to sound faint, albeit still in tune. ‘I am knocked sideways by this disease which has attacked the very part of me I needed to keep intact,’ he told Marie. The exact cause is unknown, and there is still considerable debate as to whether, and indeed how, his encroaching deafness may have affected his music.

Fauré-Fremiet argued that the string writing in the Second Violin Sonata (1916) and First Cello Sonata (1917) ‘sound somewhat lower than he intended’. Other commentators have also suggested the vocal lines of both Le jardin clos and Mirages as proof of the effect of deafness on Fauré’s writing, pointing out that they occupy a narrow compass within the singer’s middle register. Elsewhere, however, there is little to suggest that deafness, however distressing and excruciating he found it, seriously impacted his work. Although he collaborated with an assistant, Fernand Pécoud, on the orchestration of roughly a third of Pénélope, its sound world is very much his own and at times startling in its intricacy. And his last years, in fact, were to be among the most successful and prolific of his life.

In 1905, he was appointed director of the Paris Conservatoire, amid some controversy. Although he had taught composition there since 1896 (his pupils included Nadia Boulanger, Enescu, Koechlin, Ravel and Schmitt), he had never trained there, and was consequently regarded by some as an outsider. The supposedly reticent composer proved remarkably tenacious in his new role, earning the nickname ‘Robespierre’ after instigating a series of reforms aimed at revising the outmoded curriculum (singing students no longer had to confine themselves to studying the repertory of Paris’s opera houses, for instance) and forbidding professors to sit on entrance examination juries so as to prevent connivance in favour of their private pupils. His deafness eventually forced his retirement in 1920. For the first time in his life, at the age of 75, he was free to compose full-time.

After Pénélope came the series of late works that still divide opinion. The angularity and tautness of the Second Violin Sonata stand in marked contrast to the lyrical intensity of the First, written some 40 years previously. Some have argued that the Second Piano Quintet (1919-21), with its constantly developing themes, complex counterpoint and extraordinary moments of calm introversion, is the greatest and emotionally most profound of all his works, though many, I suspect, would prefer the greater beauty of its predecessor, completed in 1905 after an enormous gestation.

His last stage work, Masques et bergamasques, was first performed in Monte Carlo in 1919. A comédie musicale for actors, singers and dancers, evoking the commedia dell’arte world of Verlaine’s poetry and self-consciously gazing back to Mozart and Haydn, it is essentially a pasticcio, reworking an earlier fête galante intended for salon performance. His final song-cycle, L’horizon chimérique, completed in 1921, meanwhile, in some way echoes the lyrical profusion of his earlier songs, yet also stands apart from much of his output. The text, by Jean de la Ville de Mirmont, killed while still young in the First World War, takes sea voyages as metaphors for human aspiration, and despite the sensuousness of the third song, ‘Diane, Séléné’, the cycle’s mood is neither erotic nor amatory. At the end, the protagonist remains on land as ships set sail: the last words Fauré set to music – ‘J’ai de grands départs inassouvis en moi’ (‘I still have great departures unfulfilled in me’) – are almost unbearably poignant.

Right at the end of his life, he broke new ground with his only string quartet, a form he had previously refused to consider out of deference to Beethoven. Completed while he was staying in Annecy-le-Vieux in September 1924, it is the most stripped back and uncompromising of his chamber works, and its composition exhausted him. Soon after, he fell ill with pneumonia and in October returned to Paris, where he died the following month. ‘I did what I could,’ were his last words. ‘Now let God be my judge!’ What he left is a remarkable, at times challenging legacy of astonishing beauty and complexity, which we are still learning to appreciate in its entirety a century later.

A Fauré listening guide

Requiem

Roxane Chalard sop Mathieu Dubroca bar Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas org Ensemble Aedes; Les Siècles / Mathieu Romano

Aparté (6/19)

Conductor Mathieu Romano’s Ensemble Aedes joins Les Siècles for a performance of the Requiem that is little short of revelatory. Stark, austere, almost shockingly intense, it’s very much about grief rather than consolation, though the final release of tension into the calm of In paradisum is overwhelming.

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‘Complete Music for Solo Piano’

Lucas Debargue pf

Sony Classical (4/24)

Lucas Debargue tackles Fauré’s complete piano music in a groundbreaking survey, presented in chronological order and superbly played. It’s ideal for anyone wishing to trace and explore Fauré’s stylistic development from late Romantic to the threshold of modernism.

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‘Complete Songs’

Cyrille Dubois ten Tristan Raës pf

Aparté (8/22)

Winner of the Song category in the 2023 Gramophone Awards, this complete survey is the first ever recorded by a single singer. Although it raises questions about gender and sexuality in Fauré, this is an utterly beguiling set, its beauty and finesse apparent on every track.

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Pénélope

Jessye Norman sop Alain Vanzo ten Jocelyne Taillon mez Colette Alliot-Lugaz, Christine Barbaux, Danièle Borst, Michèle Command, Norma Lerer sops Jean Dupouy ten Paul Guigue bar et al; Jean Laforgue Voc Ens; Monte Carlo PO / Charles Dutoit

Warner (10/81)

Jessye Norman is on majestic form as Pénélope in the only readily available recording of Fauré’s opera, with the Monte Carlo PO sounding sumptuous for Charles Dutoit. Look out on YouTube, though, for Anna Caterina Antonacci in a leaner, altogether more troubling interpretation, filmed live in Strasbourg in 2015.

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‘The Secret Fauré: Orchestral Songs and Suites’

Olga Peretyatko sop Benjamin Bruns ten Balthasar Neumann Choir; Basel Symphony Orchestra / Ivor Bolton

Sony Classical (12/18)

In the first of a series juxtaposing familiar Fauré with little-known works, Ivor Bolton and the Basel SO explore his incidental music, placing the Pelléas et Mélisande suite (to which Mélisande’s song has been added in Koechlin’s orchestration) alongside Caligula and Shylock, both rarely heard and inexplicably neglected.

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​‘Proust, le concert retrouvé’

Théotime Langlois de Swarte vn Tanguy de Williencourt pf

Harmonia Mundi (5/21)

This is a recreation of a private concert programmed by Marcel Proust for Fauré as pianist and given at the Ritz, Paris, in July 1907. Centred on a tremendous performance of the First Violin Sonata, it allows us to hear Fauré through the mind of the great writer whose work he influenced.

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