In 1922, a grand Paris concert hall filled with France’s cultural elite to honor Gabriel Fauré with a national musical tribute, yet the composer sat beside the president of the republic unable to hear a single note. This episode traces how a boy from a cultured but non-musical family in the south of France, who taught himself on a school chapel harmonium, was discovered by an elderly blind woman and sent to the austere Niedermeyer School, where rigorous drilling in ancient church modes and counterpoint gave him the exact tools he would later use to break the rules of the conservative French establishment.

The story follows Fauré’s disastrous first job as a church organist in Brittany, his combat service in the Franco-Prussian War and the trauma of the Paris Commune, decades of church work and hated piano lessons to pay the rent, a mismatched marriage he called his horror of the domicile, and the 1905 scandal over his student Maurice Ravel that unexpectedly made him director of the Paris Conservatoire, where the old guard nicknamed him Robespierre. It closes with his hideously distorted hearing loss, summers composing by Swiss lakes, and the string quartet he finished weeks before his death in 1924 and refused to hear performed.

• How the Niedermeyer School’s church modes and counterpoint became Fauré’s secret weapon against traditional tonal gravity
• Why flat-fee publishing deals and endless private lessons forced him into a grueling double life as organist and composer
• The 1905 competition scandal that forced the Conservatoire’s head to resign and handed Fauré the keys to the institution
• Fauré’s ruthless reforms: independent external judges and a curriculum spanning Renaissance vocal music to Debussy
• How hearing that turned high notes sharp and low notes flat pushed his late music toward abstraction and the mind’s ear