Gabriel Urbain Faure was a French composer and professor of music.
Education
The youngest son of a schoolmaster, he was educated at the École Niedermeyer, an establishment designed primarily for the training of church musicians. This school attached some importance to a tradition of modal music older than the prevailing sentimentalities of the time but only just beginning to be recaptured.
Career
On leaving school Fauré obtained appointments as organist, first at Rennes, then in Paris, and ultimately at the Madeleine church, where he succeeded (at one remove) Camille Saint-Saëns, one of his teachers.
Fauré visited London in 1898 to conduct his incidental music for Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande in Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's production. In 1896 he had become professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire (succeeding Jules Massenet), and in 1905 he was appointed its director. Here, in the face of considerable internal opposition, he modified the program of studies in order that pupils should know something of music produced for other purposes besides the theater and in other ages than that immediately preceding their own. In his later years, he became deaf. Fauré retired from his directorship with a small pension in 1920, devoting himself thenceforth to composition--in Paris or, during summer months, at Annecy.
Connections
An unfulfilled love affair with Marianne Viardot, lasting from 1873 to 1877, was followed in 1883 by his marriage to Marie Fremiet, daughter of the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. Of their two sons the elder, Emmanuel, became a noted marine biologist, and the younger son, Philippe, was a distinguished man of letters.