"In 1905 Fauré was appointed to the post of Director of the Conservatoire National de Paris. His influence breathed a new, transforming spirit into the old institution, and his reforms were so radical that they earned him the nickname of Robespierre. "Monsieur," Théodore Dubois told him on leaving office, "do not forget that, as its name implies, the Conservatoire is intended to conserve tradition." But for Fauré, tradition had quite a different meaning. It was rooted in his knowledge of those great masters on which he himself had been reared, and not in the arbitrary study of a restrictive technique."