Five Minute Mozart - Music Theory Education

Gabriel Faure was born on May 12th, 1845, in Pamiers, France.
 
A student of Camille Saint-saens, Faure was a famous French composer of the late Romantic period.
 
Faure was much more comfortable with smaller forms, such as chamber music, piano music, and songs. Second only to Debussy, Faure wrote nearly 100 songs throughout his career. He originally composed his famous “Pavane” for the piano before producing the more popular orchestral version.
 
His larger body of work included numerous preludes, nocturnes, impromptus, and barcarolles, as well as the incidental music to Maeterlinck’s play “Pelleas et Melisande”, and his also famous “Requiem”, which, because of limited available time to dedicate to composing, took over 20 years to complete.
 
Faure made a living in many different ways. Beginning in the late 1890s he was principal organist at the Madeleine church in Paris. He also became an influential teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, where he had many prominent students, including Maurice Ravel. In 1905, he was appointed as director of the school, a position which he held for 15 years before retiring in 1920 to focus exclusively on composing. However, by this time he was becoming very ill and almost entirely deaf.
 
Gabriel Faure died of pneumonia on November 4th, 1924, in Paris, France at the age of 79.