Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Piano Music

Born in 1845 in southern France, the young Fauré was both reticent and apart. A possibly unwanted addition to a large family, he was the sixth child of Honoré and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Fauré and spent his first four years away from home with a foster nurse.

Despite provincial beginnings, Fame soon found his way to Paris and to music school. He studied at Niedermeyer's Ecole de Musique Classique et Religieuse, devoted to the study of music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, training for a career as a choirmaster and organist. Niedermeyer kept the young composer well away from the influences of the new Romantics and it was not until the appointment of Saint-Saëns as his teacher that Fauré was introduced to contemporary artists and musicians such as Liszt, Schumann and Wagner.

After a spell as organist at Saint Sauveur in Rennes, he was back in Paris at Notre-Dame-de-Clignancoutt by 1870. The con