Jessica Duchen
Music journalist and critic
‘We all live ridiculously busy lives these days, but just take a look at French composer Gabriel Fauré’s schedule – sometimes I wonder how he managed to write any music at all…’
‘To my mind art, and above all music, consists in lifting us as far as possible above what is,’ Gabriel Fauré once wrote. The composer had good reason to wish to transcend reality. his difficult status as establishment ‘outsider’, a marriage of a few ups and many downs, an almost impossible work-life balance, and, in middle age, the onset of deafness: all made his compositional quest singularly hard won.
To achieve great things, Leonard Bernstein said, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. For most of his life Fauré had not nearly enough time to compose; most of his music was left much to his own devices in a beautiful garden in Mongauzy, southwest France; in a nearby chapel, an elderly blind lady showed him how the harmonium worked. When he was sent to the Niedermeyer School in distant Paris, aged nine, to begin training for life as a church musician, there was no particular sign that he would take to composition.
At school Fauré was popular with the professors for his charm and talent, though the other boys bullied him. When he was about 15, a new piano teacher arrived: the 25-year-old Camille Saint-saëns. And it was he who encouraged the lad to compose his first song, which he duly did in the
nevertheless, was that provided by himself and the high standard of his own art; his pupils offering to so true a musician only the very best they could write and fearing, as unworthy of his artistic integrity, any concession or platitude.’
In 1905 Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome for the fifth time, despite being well established in the public eye – and scandal broke out when it turned out all the finalists were pupils of Charles Lenepveu, a jury member. During ‘L’affaire Ravel’ the Conservatoire was rocked by resignations, including that of the director, Théodore Dubois. Fauré, as Ravel’s teacher and an outsider – he had never studied there himself – was appointed in his place to calm the troubled waters. his radical modernisations that took place over the next 14 years saw him nicknamed ‘Robespierre’, as he dragged the institution belatedly into the modern age.
Fauré remained at the Conservatoire to see out World War I, but in 1919 the elderly composer was prised out of office into retirement, much to his fury. It was, nevertheless, the best thing that could have happened: he was free to devote himself entirely to composition for the very first time, aged 74. he produced a stream of masterpieces – the most adventurous music he had ever written. The Piano Quintet No. 2, the Piano Trio, the song cycle L’horizon chimérique, his final piano pieces and his last work – his sole String Quartet – poured from his unleashed pen, even though he was by then stone deaf.
Fauré died of pneumonia, aged 79, in November 1924. he left French music transformed through his example, his modernisation of the Conservatoire, his influence on his students and the impact, on those who knew it, of his pure-hearted, perfectly wrought music. And yet it seems miraculous that Fauré had found time to write any at all.
Fauré devoted himself entirely to composition for the first time, aged 74