Fauré's marriage

Gabriel Fauré was born in 1845 in Pamiers in south-west France, about seventy kilometres south of Toulouse. From the age of nine he was educated in Paris at the École de Musique Classique et Réligieuse founded by Louis Niedermeyer in 1853, a boarding school created specifically for teaching music and the humanities. Upon the death of Niedermeyer in 1861, Fauré became a pupil and close friend of Saint-Saëns, who, although ten years his senior, provided the key which opened the doors to the musical élite of the day. His own first composition pupil was André Messager, also soon to become a close friend. In 1871 Fauré was one of the founding members of the Société nationale de musique (SNM), an organisation which aimed to promote contemporary French music. He became Choirmaster at the church of Saint-Sulpice under Charles-Marie Widor and in the 1870s often took Saint-Saëns’ place at the organ of La Madeleine. He was soon assimilated into musical and social society with help from established families, including that of Pauline Viardot. Fauré fell deeply in love with Pauline's daughter Marianne, but her affection could not match his passion. In fear of his ardent nature, it took four years for her to be persuaded to become engaged to Gabriel in July 1877, the year he was appointed to the prestigious but arduous task of Maître de Chapelle at La Madeleine under Théodore Dubois. Marianne was twenty-three; he was thirty-two. Unable to reconcile herself to the marriage, three months later she made the inevitable break with her fiancé.

Fauré was by now an attractive, mature bachelor, exerting a magnetic power over the young women who frequented the salons and concerts he attended. A stream of beautiful songs and instrumental works flowed from his pen, performed and admired in the drawing rooms of wealthy patrons of music. A major figure who welcomed him to her salon was Marguerite Baugnies, who in 1892 became Marguerite (or Meg) de Saint-Marceaux after her second marriage to the sculptor René de Saint-Marceaux. Younger than Fauré by five years, she was the dedicatee of his song Après un rêve and the first Nocturne for piano. In 1875 she moved to 100 boulevard Malesherbes, where she instigated her famous ‘Fridays’, welcoming such musicians as Messager, Gounod, Hahn, Chausson, Ravel, Dukas and, for a while, Debussy.