- Children: sons Emanuel and Philippe.
- Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
- In his last months, Fauré struggled to complete his String Quartet. Twenty years earlier he had been the dedicatee of Ravel's String Quartet. Ravel and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own. He refused for many years, on the grounds that it was too difficult. When he finally decided to write it, he did so in trepidation, telling his wife, "I've started a Quartet for strings, without piano. This is a genre which Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes all those who are not Beethoven to be terrified of it." He worked on the piece for a year, finishing it on 11 September 1924, less than two months before he died, working long hours towards the end to complete it. The quartet was premiered after his death.
- He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers.
- Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune".
- In 1920, at the age of 75, Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. In that year he received the Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneur, an honour rare for a musician. In 1922 the president of the republic, Alexandre Millerand, led a public tribute to Fauré, a national hommage, described in The Musical Times as "a splendid celebration at the Sorbonne, in which the most illustrious French artists participated, [which] brought him great joy. It was a poignant spectacle, indeed: that of a man present at a concert of his own works and able to hear not a single note. He sat gazing before him pensively, and, in spite of everything, grateful and content.".
- In a centenary tribute in 1945, the musicologist Leslie Orrey wrote in The Musical Times, "'More profound than Saint-Saëns, more varied than Lalo, more spontaneous than d'Indy, more classic than Debussy, Gabriel Fauré is the master par excellence of French music, the perfect mirror of our musical genius.' Perhaps, when English musicians get to know his work better, these words of Roger-Ducasse will seem, not over-praise, but no more than his due.
- Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century.
- When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations.
- Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a young boy.
- After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition.
- When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition.
- An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic.
- During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.
- Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher.
- Fauré's biographer Nectoux writes in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that Fauré is widely regarded as the greatest master of French song, and that alongside the mélodies, the chamber works rank as "Fauré's most important contribution to music".
- Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.
- Fauré made piano rolls of his music for several companies between 1905 and 1913. Well over a hundred recordings of Fauré's music were made between 1898 and 1905, mostly of songs, with a few short chamber works, by performers including the singers Jean Noté and Pol Plançon and players such as Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot.
- By his last years, he was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day.
- Fauré suffered from poor health in his later years, brought on in part by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les Six, most of whom were devoted to him.
- At the age of nine, he was sent to the Ecole Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend.
- In 1905 a scandal erupted in French musical circles over the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome. Fauré's pupil Ravel had been eliminated prematurely in his sixth attempt for this award, and many believed that reactionary elements within the Conservatoire had played a part in it.[80] Dubois, who became the subject of much censure, brought forward his retirement and stepped down at once. Appointed in his place, and with the support of the French government, Fauré radically changed the administration and curriculum. He appointed independent external judges to decide on admissions, examinations and competitions, a move which enraged faculty members who had given preferential treatment to their private pupils; feeling themselves deprived of a considerable extra income, many of them resigned.
- Contemporary accounts agree that Fauré was extremely attractive to women; in Duchen's phrase, "his conquests were legion in the Paris salons." After a romantic attachment to the singer Emma Bardac from around 1892,[55] followed by another to the composer Adela Maddison, in 1900 Fauré met the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, the daughter of Alphonse Hasselmans. This led to a relationship which lasted for the rest of Fauré's life. He maintained her in a Paris apartment, and she acted openly as his companion.
- In his late forties Fauré began a liaison with Emma Bardac. For the first time he experienced a fulfilling, passionate relationship which extended over several years. His principal biographers all agree that this affair inspired a burst of creativity and a new originality in his music, exemplified in the song cycle La bonne chanson. Fauré wrote the Dolly Suite for piano duet between 1894 and 1897 and dedicated it to Bardac's daughter Hélène, known as "Dolly". Some people suspected that Fauré was Dolly's father, but biographers including Nectoux and Duchen think it unlikely. Fauré's affair with Emma Bardac is thought to have begun after Dolly was born, though there is no conclusive evidence either way.
- After Fauré's death, the Conservatoire abandoned his radicalism and became resistant to new trends in music, with Fauré's own harmonic practice being held up as the farthest limit of modernity, beyond which students should not go. His successor, Henri Rabaud, director of the Conservatoire from 1922 to 1941, declared "modernism is the enemy". The generation of students born between the wars rejected this outdated premise, turning for inspiration to Bartók, the Second Viennese School, and the latest works of Stravinsky.
- In 1890 a prestigious and remunerative commission to write an opera with lyrics by Paul Verlaine was aborted by the poet's drunken inability to deliver a libretto. Fauré was plunged into so deep a depression that his friends were seriously concerned about his health.[ Winnaretta de Scey-Montbéliard,[n 7] always a good friend to Fauré, invited him to Venice, where she had a palazzo on the Grand Canal. He recovered his spirits and began to compose again, writing the first of his five Mélodies de Venise, to words by Verlaine, whose poetry he continued to admire despite the operatic debacle.
- From his thirties he suffered bouts of depression, which he described as "spleen", possibly first caused by his broken engagement and his lack of success as a composer.
- The outbreak of the First World War almost stranded Fauré in Germany, where he had gone for his annual composing retreat. He managed to get from Germany into Switzerland, and thence to Paris. He remained in France for the duration of the war.
- Fauré's works of the last years of the century include incidental music for the English premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (1898) and Prométhée, a lyric tragedy composed for the amphitheatre at Béziers. Written for outdoor performance, the work is scored for huge instrumental and vocal forces. Its premiere in August 1900 was a great success, and it was revived at Béziers the following year and in Paris in 1907. A version with orchestration for normal opera house-sized forces was given at the Paris Opéra in May 1917 and received more than forty performances in Paris thereafter.
- From 1903 to 1921, Fauré regularly wrote music criticism for Le Figaro, a role in which he was not at ease. Nectoux writes that Fauré's natural kindness and broad-mindedness predisposed him to emphasise the positive aspects of a work.
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