ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the first study of the professional and personal friendship between Paul Dukas and Gabriel Faure. Drawing on a wealth of archival resources, including several unpublished letters from Faure to Dukas, this account sheds light on how their relationship evolved. Faure took up his post as Director of the Paris Conservatoire in October 1905, he made Dukas a member of the institution’s Conseil superieur, together with Andre Messager, Alexandre Guilmant, and Rose Caron, and Dukas was to serve regularly on the juries for the Conservatoire’s examinations. In 1909, Faure offered Dukas the prestigious post of professor of the ensemble class at the Conservatoire, a role left vacant by the death of Taffanel. For Dukas, the composer of the Requiem was both a benchmark and, in terms of musical technique, a counterweight to the revolutionary works Debussy was writing up to 1918, and to the generation of Les Six after that.
