Presentation of the festival

To mark the centenary of his death in 1924, the Palazzetto Bru Zane honours Gabriel Fauré in the company of the artists he trained.

The task of turning the page on Romanticism and calming the deep divisions in the French musical world at the dawn of the twentieth century fell to a figure with an atypical career trajectory and indisputable artistic merits. Gabriel Fauré had not studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and his first masterpieces had not been written for the operatic stage. A student of Saint-Saëns at the École Niedermeyer, he initially found outlets for his music at avant-garde concerts, in churches and in the salons. In a France torn apart by the Dreyfus affair, he embodied a compromise as much as a new path. His influence as a teacher of composition deserves to be explored anew: it was felt by a number of musicians who were to enjoy remarkable careers, including Nadia Boulanger, George Enescu, Charles Koechlin, Maurice Ravel and Florent Schmitt.