He was one of the leading French composers of his generation, and although his best-known and most accessible compositions were his earliest, he composed many of his most beloved works in the last years of his life, in a style more harmonically and melodically complex.

Camille Saint-Saëns, who became his lifelong friend, was one of his teachers.

Did you know ?
When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and at the time of Gabriel Fauré's death,1