Composer, organist, pianist and teacher, Gabriel Fauré is one of the central figures in French music of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. He belonged to the generation of artists, alongside Édouard Lalo, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d’Indy and Ernest Chausson, who moved seamlessly from the Romantic era to the explorations of the new century. Some call Fauré “the French Schumann”, others describe him as “the link between Brahms and Debussy”. At the age of nine, he was sent to the Ecole Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster, and after eleven years of study, he became assistant organist at the church of Saint-Sulpice. He was a regular guest at Saint-Saëns’s home, where famous Parisian musicians gathered, and took part in the creation of the National Musical Society.In 1874 he left Saint-Sulpice and began to replace Saint-Saëns at the Église de la Madeleine during his frequent absences, and after his retirement in 1877 Fauré took over as choirmaster. For many years the busy work of the church prevented him from devoting himself entirely to composition.It was not until 1896 that he obtained a teaching post at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils included such great French composers as Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger, and in 1905 he became director of the Conservatoire. By this time he was already widely known as a composer, and in parallel he was for almost twenty years the authoritative music critic of the newspapers. “Despite his failing health and the almost complete loss of his hearing, he continued to communicate actively with young contemporary artists until the end of his life, and was particularly influential on the group of the “Le Six” (Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre) who created the new face of French musical culture in the mid-twentieth century.