This wide-ranging study of Gabriel Faur and his contemporaries reclaims aesthetic categories crucial to French musical life in the early twentieth century. Its interrelated chapters treat the topics of sincerity, originality, novelty, self-renewal, homogeneity and religious belief in relation to Faur 's music and ideas. Taking a broad view of cultural life during the composer's lifetime and beyond, the book moves between specific details in Faur 's...