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The quality most commonly attributed to Gabriel Fauré by those who knew him is “charm.” Both men and women were susceptible to it. “No one,” wrote his friend Camille Bellaigue, “possessed to the same degree as Fauré the mysterious gift that no other can replace or surpass: charm. In and around him, all was seductive.” The Princesse de Polignac clearly agreed with him: “No one could resist Fauré’s charm of manner, his gaiety, his tenderness.” Critics and other observers discerned the same quality in his music, sometimes disparagingly - Debussy described him with characteristic irony as the “master of charms” - but more often approvingly: “He combines a profound musical technique with a rich abundance of melody,” wrote Saint-Saëns in a review of the First Violin Sonata adding, “On top of all that hovers a charm which envelops the entire work.”

There was far more than charm to Fauré the man, however, just as there is far more to the music. He certainly lacked ambition in the early part of his career and needed a mentor like Camille Saint-Saëns, a professional through and through, both to encourage him in his work and to introduce him to the influential artistic salons of Paris where, of course, his charm would be a priceless asset. But underneath that seductive surface there was a steely determination. When he was appointed director of the Paris Conservatoire - against all the odds, since he was not himself a product of that august institution - his colleagues might have expected an easy time. The reality was very different: his reforms were so radical and so ruthlessly carried out, the resulting resignations so numerous, that he earned the nickname of “Robespierre.” At the same time, while his many mistresses no doubt enjoyed the charm, at least until he moved on to the next one, his long-suffering wife was reduced, as she herself observed, to “the zero of the family.”

While this combination of charm and determination could be uncomfortable for others, it served him well - since he needed all the sympathy he could get and all the defiance he could muster - when, in his late fifties, he had to cope with what he described to his wife as “the worst thing possible.” He was going deaf and, for a musician, in a particularly disturbing way. Sounds were “so wildly distorted,” he complained, “that I thought I was going mad. With the spoken word to be deaf is to hear very feebly and indistinctly but when it comes to music my deafness produces an extraordinary phenomenon. The lower pitched intervals are distorted in proportion to the amount they descend and the high-pitched intervals in proportion to the amount they ascend. Can you imagine the results of this divergence? It is infernal.”

A less determined musician might have just capitulated. Fauré went on much as before, eventually giving up playing the piano in his chamber works but continuing to accompany his songs even when he was completely deaf. “With Fauré,” one of his singers recalled, “one often reached the end with a discrepancy of several bars!” Above all, he went on composing, completing his opera Pénélope in 1912 and producing some of his greatest songs, chamber music and piano music down to the physically enfeebled last few years of his life.

These late works - including several masterly song cycles, the Second Violin Sonata, the two Cello Sonatas, the Piano Trio and the String Quartet - are remarkable more for their inner strength than for their charm. The consequence is that they are still neglected in favour of more youthful works like the Cantique de Jean Racine, the First Violin Sonata, the two Piano Quartets, the first forty or so songs, the Pelléas et Melisande incidental music and, of course, the Requiem. Saint-Saëns, who had been such a faithful supporter of Fauré in his youth, thought that he had “gone completely mad” as early as 1894 when, under the intoxicating influence of his love affair with Emma Bardac, he wrote his wonderful Verlaine song cycle La bonne chanson.

Essentially, however, in spite of his deafness and ill health of other kinds, the composer in his old age was as engagingly enigmatic as ever. As he wrote to his wife in 1921, “Your character is definite and clear-cut. Mine is not. I shall die the same elusive person I have always been… I have been reserved all my life, even as a child, and have been able to let myself go only in certain situations.” If the late works are more elusive than the early favourites they are even more fascinating for that.

Useful quotes:

Francis Poulenc, who had “always been allergic” to Fauré’s music, confess that “with age I must admit that he is a very great musician but his Requiem makes me lose my faith and it is a real penance for me to hear it. It is one of the few things I hate in music.”

When someone asked Fauré “beneath what marvellous sky he had conceived the start of the Sixth Nocture,” he replied: “Beneath the Simplon tunnel!”

Fauré on the mission of the composer: “Artistic conscience alone should guide him - the desire for the faithful expression of his sentiments and for perfection of form without concern for immediate or eventual external success. To express that which is within you with sincerity in the clear and most perfect manner would seem to me always the ultimate goal of art.”