Why is Fauré not more celebrated?

It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and rhythms that nudge us towards the future. No other composer deploys such subversive mastery of the conventions of French music: again and again, if we look underneath the arches of his melodies, we find ambiguous chromatic shifts or disorientating spiralling arpeggios.

For some critics, the musical argument of Fauré’s late chamber work is so understated it evaporates

And – see above – no other French composer is so hard to describe without falling into a purple puddle. I’ve already used up spellbinding, subversive and ambiguous, but that still leaves subtle, sophisticated, exquisite, reflective and a dozen other adjectives before we reach the laziest but most useful of them all: elusive. That word is a get-out-of-jail-free card: ‘Fauré is a composer, subtle, elusive and precise’… ‘Fauré’s music tends to be elusive, sometimes cryptic’… ‘The mélodies of Gabriel Fauré lie at the heart of his romantic but elusive style’, etc.

Mostly this elusiveness is presented as a virtue and of course it can be: some of the towering masterpieces of the classical canon are written in perplexing language that demands repeated listening. It’s true of the late Beethoven string quartets, and that’s an analogy often employed by Fauré enthusiasts because both composers wrote their late chamber music when they were severely deaf.

Fauré’s ordeal strikes us as less devastating than Beethoven’s because it began when he was in his mid-fifties rather than his late twenties – that is, before he became head of the Paris Conservatoire, a position he held from 1905 until 1920. But he had to endure the added torment of aural hallucinations, causing him to hear low and high notes grotesquely out of tune.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Is Britain heading for bankruptcy?

Zoe Strimpel

Britain is now a slackers’ paradise

Graeme Thomson

We’ve underestimated Francis Rossi

You’d think that would disqualify him from running France’s most august musical institution – yet he clung on until he was 75 because he was engaged in a bloody fight to modernise the Conservatoire, which as late as 1900 revered Auber and Meyerbeer and banned Wagner.