Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was born in Pamiers, in the Ariège, in May 1845. He was sent at nine to the École Niedermeyer in Paris, a school established to train church musicians, where he studied for eleven years — receiving an education in plainchant, modal harmony and Renaissance polyphony that gave his later style its distinctive flexibility within and outside tonal convention. His composition teacher there was Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend.

He earned his living for forty years as a church organist — at Rennes, then at Saint-Sulpice, Sainte-Clotilde, and from 1896 as titular organist of the Madeleine. He taught composition at the Paris Conservatoire from 1896, where his pupils included Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Nadia Boulanger and Charles Koechlin, and was its Director from 1905 to 1920. His major works run across song (the cycles *La bonne chanson* and *L’horizon chimérique*), chamber music (two piano quartets, two piano quintets, a piano trio, two cello sonatas), and large-scale forms (the *Requiem*, the operas *Prométhée* and *Pénélope*).

Fauré went deaf in his last twenty years — like Beethoven, with his hearing distorting before failing — but continued to compose. He died in Paris in November 1924. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his vocal, chamber and choral work.