Gabriel Fauré
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40 free Gabriel Fauré trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Gabriel Fauré wrote some of the most soothing music in the classical repertoire, yet his life was anything but quiet. He was dismissed from his first church job, went to war, fell in and out of love, and ended up shaking the most powerful music school in France to its foundations. This quiz collects the fun facts behind the music: the stories of the Requiem, the Pavane and the Dolly Suite, the teachers and pupils who shaped French music around him, the patrons who kept him going, and the honours that arrived late in his long career. You will also meet his songs, his stage works and the surprising places his tunes turned up after his death. The questions start with facts any music lover can reason out and move towards details for devoted fans. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works for a concert-interval challenge, a music class or a choir social.
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Q 01Despite its feline title, the Kitty-valse in Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite portrays which family pet?
A dog
A dog called Ketty belonged to the Bardac family, and Fauré's manuscript titles the piece Ketty-Valse. His publisher changed the spelling to Kitty.
Q 02Emma Bardac, the soprano who inspired Gabriel Fauré's La bonne chanson, later married which other French composer?
Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy married her in 1908, after a scandal in which both of them left their spouses. He wrote his Children's Corner suite for their daughter, nicknamed Chouchou.
Q 03After which figure from French history did angry professors nickname Gabriel Fauré during his Conservatoire reforms?
Robespierre
Robespierre was the old guard's name for him after he brought in outside judges for exams, ending the edge professors gave their own private pupils. Many of them resigned.
Q 04Why was the young Gabriel Fauré asked to resign his church post in Rennes one Sunday in 1870?
Played Mass in evening dress
He played Mass in evening dress, having come straight from an all-night ball. The parish priest already doubted his piety: Fauré was often seen slipping out during the sermon for a cigarette.
Q 05Which piano virtuoso said he had run out of fingers when he first tried Gabriel Fauré's music?
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt made the remark to Fauré at his first attempt at the music. Its rippling figures share the melody between both hands, which still makes it daunting for pianists.
Q 06According to Gabriel Fauré himself, for what reason did he compose his celebrated Requiem?
For pleasure
For pleasure was his own answer, though both his parents died around the time he wrote it. After years of accompanying burial services, he said, he wanted to write something different.
Q 07Which woodwind instrument plays the haunting opening melody of Gabriel Fauré's Pavane?
Flute
The flute theme, once heard, is not easily forgotten, as one Fauré scholar put it. The composer himself thought the piece elegant but not particularly important.
Q 08For which instrument, his bread and butter for four decades, did Gabriel Fauré leave no solo works?
Organ
Organ playing gave him a regular income at Paris churches, but he preferred the piano. He was renowned for his improvisations, yet never wrote a solo piece for the instrument.
Q 09Actress Mrs Patrick Campbell commissioned Gabriel Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande music for an 1898 staging in which city?
London
London saw the play's first production in English, with Fauré conducting the theatre orchestra himself. He had barely six weeks to write the score, so he reused some older pieces.
Q 10Souvenirs de Bayreuth, a piano-duet romp by Gabriel Fauré and André Messager, pokes fun at which composer's operas?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner's Ring cycle supplies the themes, sped up for four hands. The two friends travelled to Cologne, Munich and Bayreuth to hear his operas, then played their spoof at parties.
Q 11Which French composer taught the teenage Gabriel Fauré piano and remained his close friend for sixty years?
Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns let lessons overrun to play the boys modern music that their strict school ignored. Fauré spoke of an almost filial attachment to him for the rest of his life.
Q 12Which pupil of Gabriel Fauré was knocked out of the 1905 Prix de Rome, sparking a national scandal?
Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel, by then thirty, was eliminated in the first round, which even hostile critics called unjustifiable. The furore made the Conservatoire's director retire early, and Fauré replaced him.
Q 13What condition forced Gabriel Fauré to retire from the Paris Conservatoire in 1920 at the age of 75?
Q 21Which fiery section, a highlight of Verdi's Requiem, did Gabriel Fauré leave out of his own gentle setting?
Dies irae
Dies irae, the terrifying vision of judgment day, is missing: he kept only its closing prayer. Fauré said he saw death as a happy deliverance, not a painful experience.
Q 22Gabriel Fauré's Requiem ends with which serene movement, whose text comes from the burial service, not the funeral Mass?
In Paradisum
In Paradisum pictures angels leading the soul to paradise over shimmering broken chords. It helps explain why the whole work has been called a lullaby of death.
Q 23At the Madeleine premiere of Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in 1888, who sang the Pie Jesu solo?
A boy treble
Deafness
Deafness had been creeping up on him for years, and it distorted pitch too: high and low notes sounded painfully out of tune. He went on composing all the same.
Q 14Gabriel Fauré's sombre Élégie, later played with orchestra by Pablo Casals, was written for piano and which instrument?
Cello
Cello and piano was the original scoring: the piece began as the slow movement of a sonata Fauré never finished. It was such a success that a conductor asked for an orchestral version.
Q 15Après un rêve, one of Gabriel Fauré's most popular songs, has a title meaning what in English?
After a dream
After a dream is the meaning: the singer wakes from a blissful flight with a lover and longs for the night to return. The French words adapt an anonymous Italian poem.
Q 16Gabriel Fauré's opera Pénélope retells the hero's homecoming from which ancient epic poem?
The Odyssey
The Odyssey supplied the story of Ulysses returning to his faithful wife in Ithaca. Fauré could only compose during summer holidays, so he had the libretto cut from five acts to three.
Q 17Gabriel Fauré's Shylock suite began as music for a French stage adaptation of which Shakespeare play?
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice was reworked by the poet Edmond Haraucourt for the Odéon theatre in Paris. Its songs have words Shakespeare never wrote, including a serenade for Venetian revellers.
Q 18Gabriel Fauré volunteered as a soldier and fought to raise the siege of Paris during which war?
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, and he saw action at Le Bourget, Champigny and Créteil. When the violence of the Commune followed, he escaped Paris and taught in Switzerland.
Q 19The American-born heiress who rescued Gabriel Fauré from a deep depression in 1891 owed her fortune to which invention?
Sewing machines
Sewing machines made the fortune of Winnaretta Singer, daughter of the manufacturer Isaac Singer. She invited Fauré to her palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he began composing again.
Q 20The Berceuse from Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite closed every edition of which BBC radio programme for small children?
Listen with Mother
Listen with Mother signed off with the lullaby from 1950 to 1982, which made the tune famous in Britain. One presenter recalled dashing to the studio piano to play it live.
A boy treble, Louis Aubert, sang it because the church allowed no female singers. In concert halls Fauré preferred women for the solo, which demands excellent breath control.
Q 24Which poet's verses did Gabriel Fauré set in Clair de lune and the song cycle La bonne chanson?
Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine was also meant to write Fauré an opera libretto, but the poet's drinking meant it never arrived. The let-down plunged the composer into depression.
Q 25The choral Cantique that won nineteen-year-old Gabriel Fauré a school prize sets words by which French playwright?
Jean Racine
Jean Racine wrote the text as a French paraphrase of a Latin hymn for matins. Fauré's setting took first prize at his school in 1865 and is now often paired with his Requiem.
Q 26Reynaldo Hahn joked that the overture to Fauré's Masques et bergamasques sounded like which composer imitating Fauré?
Mozart
Mozart imitating Fauré was the quip, and Fauré found the idea amusing. The overture was not new at all: he had rescued it from a symphony he abandoned fifty years earlier.
Q 27George Balanchine set which gemstone-named section of his ballet Jewels to music by Gabriel Fauré?
Emeralds
Emeralds opens the ballet to extracts from Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock, danced in calf-length romantic tulle. The other two sections turn to Russian composers.
Q 28At which royal residence was Gabriel Fauré invited to play in 1908, opening many doors for him in Britain?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace welcomed him in 1908. Britain was the one country outside France where his music won many admirers in his lifetime; elsewhere it took decades to catch on.
Q 29Which English composer dined with Gabriel Fauré in 1908 and praised him as the highest kind of Frenchman?
Edward Elgar
Edward Elgar dined with him when Fauré was in London for the first London performance of Elgar's First Symphony. He later tried to get Fauré's Requiem sung at the Three Choirs Festival, but England did not hear it until the 1930s.
Q 30American composer Aaron Copland, a devoted admirer, called Gabriel Fauré the French counterpart of which German master?
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was the comparison: Copland called him the Brahms of France. Fauré's subtle, flowing rhythms use discreet syncopations much like those in the German's music.