Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) is a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher.

He is one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influences many 20th-century composers.

Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, nocturnes for piano, and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune".

Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composes many of his greatest works in his later years, in a harmonically and melodically much more complex style.

Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family.

His talent becomes clear when he is a small boy.

At the age of nine, he is sent to a music college in Paris, where he is trained to be a church organist and choirmaster.

Among his teachers is Camille Saint-Saëns, who becomes a lifelong friend.

After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earns a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition.

When he becomes successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacks time for composing; he retreats to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition.

By his last years, Fauré is recognized in France as the leading French composer of his day.

An unprecedented national musical tribute is held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic.

Outside France, Fauré's music takes decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he has many admirers during his lifetime.

Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century.

When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard.

The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations.

During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness.

In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.