Why is Fauré not more celebrated?

It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and rhythms that nudge us towards the future. No other composer deploys such subversive mastery of the conventions of French music: again and again, if we look underneath the arches of his melodies, we find ambiguous chromatic shifts or disorientating spiralling arpeggios.

For some critics, the musical argument of Fauré’s late chamber work is so understated it evaporates

And – see above – no other French composer is so hard to describe without falling into a purple puddle. I’ve already used up spellbinding, subversive and ambiguous, but that still leaves subtle, sophisticated, exquisite, reflective and a dozen other adjectives before we reach the laziest but most useful of them all: elusive. That word is a get-out-of-jail-free card: ‘Fauré is a composer, subtle, elusive and precise’… ‘Fauré’s music tends to be elusive, sometimes cryptic’… ‘The mélodies of Gabriel Fauré lie at the heart of his romantic but elusive style’, etc.