This wide-ranging study of Gabriel Faure 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 Faure'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 Faure's music and related critical, literary and philosophical issues, ranging from Gounod to Boulez and from Proust to Valery. Above all, the book connects abstract values to artistic choices and thus places such works as Faure's Requiem, La bonne chanson, La chanson d'Eve, L'horizon chimerique, and the chamber music in a new light.