Most of Fauré’s music emerged during summer holidays, away from Paris
emerged during summer holidays, away from Paris, preferably amid lakeside landscapes. his output is considerable in piano music, songs and chamber music – works that he and his colleagues could perform in the Parisian salons. But his only symphony bit the dust early on, as did an unfinished violin concerto, and only one of his operas came to fruition – Pénélope, premiered in 1913. More surprisingly, although he spent many years as choirmaster, then organist, of La Madeleine, Paris’s high society church, he wrote relatively little to be performed there. One notable exception was his deeply unconventional Requiem.
Fauré had little time, but he does not seem to have had a plan – at least, not one that involved writing music. According to his son Philippe Fauré-fremiet, the child Gabriel, youngest son of a schoolmaster, school canteen. A Victor hugo setting,
Le papillon et la fleur is still a popular recital number today.
Saint-saëns became not only Fauré’s mentor, but also his lifelong champion. he helped Fauré find his first church organist jobs and his later post at the Madeleine; he introduced him, too, to most of the people who changed his life in one way or another. But first came the calamity of war.
When hostilities broke out between France and Prussia in 1870, Saint-saëns fled to London. Fauré stayed in France and enlisted. he was honoured with the Croix de guerre, which suggests he must have seen significant action in battle. It is not impossible that his experiences of war left him with what we would now term posttraumatic stress, which could perhaps account for his subsequent periods of depression, headaches and dizzy spells.
In the battered French capital, after the Commune collapsed, a Société Nationale de Musique was founded in 1871 headed by Saint-saëns and the singing teacher Romain Bussine. The intention was to create a platform for new French music, and implicitly to encourage the creation of a distinctively French style. Fauré was of course a founder member, along with Bizet, Franck and Massenet, among others.
Around the same time, Saint-saëns introduced him to the legendary, but long retired singer Pauline Viardot, friend of Chopin, and muse to Meyerbeer, Gounod, Berlioz and her ‘admirer’, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who lived with her and her husband. The young composer promptly fell in love with Viardot’s third daughter, Marianne, and spent four years courting her, which brought him fortuitously into the family’s artistic circles. Viardot’s son, Paul, was a violinist and Fauré created his early violin music for him, notably the impassioned Sonata No. 1 in A major. It is clear, though, from surviving correspondence, that it was really for Marianne, to whom he termed it ‘our Sonata’.
Fauré’s appointment as choirmaster at the Madeleine gave him the wherewithal to propose; but ultimately Marianne dumped him, scared off by his intensity. It’s possible that hints of her personality and Fauré’s can be found in a story by Turgenev written a few years later, The Song of Triumphant Love, which concerns a fragile, timid girl and a dark, mysterious musician wielding a magic violin.
It was no coincidence that Fauré wrote the supremely disillusioned song Après un rêve at this point, 1877, as well as the Elégie for cello and piano. But in time, he was well consoled: he became extremely popular with the opposite sex, and continued to be after he married Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, in 1883. The marriage brought two sons but numerous problems, notably the hefty matter of earning a living for the family.
Besides his plentiful duties at the Madeleine, he was giving continual private lessons, serving as an inspector of provincial conservatoires, which entailed long train journeys and spending numerous evenings at the Parisian salons – the chief outlet for what music he had time to write. Years of overwork and exhaustion threatened him with collapse, but Winaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac, invited him away to an extended house party in a Venetian palazzo.
The trip, in 1891, worked wonders. Spirits restored, Fauré sat in the Café Florian on the Piazza San Marco to begin what became his Cinq mélodies ‘de Venise’: settings of Paul Verlaine, the poet who inspired arguably his finest mélodies. The Princesse’s attempts to match composer and poet to create an opera about the life of the Buddha came to nothing; Verlaine was already in the grip of the alcoholism that killed him.
But Fauré’s song cycle on his poetry, La bonne chanson (1892-4), was a watershed: an emotional expansion and a new flowering of harmonic adventurousness.
The cycle was written with the advice and input of Emma Bardac, a fine soprano and wife of a philandering banker; she and Fauré appear to have enjoyed a fulfilling love affair that did the composer much good. It was for Emma’s infant daughter, Dolly, that he wrote his Dolly Suite for piano duet, piece by piece, over several years (of course, it was long rumoured that Dolly was Fauré’s daughter). In 1904 Emma finally left her husband… for Claude Debussy.
In October 1896 Fauré acquired yet another strand in his busy life: a teaching post at the Paris Conservatoire, after Massenet resigned in pique at having been passed over for the directorship. ★ere he became mentor to a gifted group of budding composers; over the years they included George Enescu from Romania, Nadia Boulanger, Florent Schmitt, Charles Koechlin, Arthur ★onegger and Maurice Ravel, who was expelled for failing to write an acceptable fugue, but continued to attend Fauré’s classes as an observer.
As a teacher, Fauré, wrote Koechlin, was ‘a purist who detested clumsiness and carelessness. The most efficient spur,