Requiem, Op. 48

• Fauré composed his Requiem in 1877 and revised it in 1887–93. The original version was for chamber orchestra and organ; he arranged the work for full orchestra in 1900.¹
• Fauré’s Requiem premiered in Paris at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire on July 12, 1900. Paul Taffanel conducted the performance.²
• Unlike many composers, whose impetus to write a Requiem was the death of a specific person, Fauré claimed that he wrote his Requiem simply “for the pleasure of it.”³

“It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.” 

Gabriel Fauré on his Requiem, in an interview with Louis Aguettant on July 12, 1902.⁴

“As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.”

Gabriel Fauré on his Requiem, in an interview with Louis Aguettant on July 12, 1902.⁵

1. Jean-Michel Nectoux, “Fauré, Gabriel,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed February 25, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000009366.
2. “Requiem, Op. 48 (Fauré, Gabriel),” IMSLP, accessed February 26, 2021, https://imslp.org/wiki/Requiem%2C_Op.48_(Faur%C3%A9%2C_Gabriel).
3. Jean-Michel Nectoux, “Fauré, Gabriel,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed February 25, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000009366.
4. Quoted in Robert Orledge, Gabriel Fauré (UK: Eulenburg, 1979), 115.
5. Ibid.