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.

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.