Albert Roussel

Albert Roussel began life as a sailor, but in his second career as a composer he created music whose energy, assurance and clarity blew like a fresh sea breeze through French music in the first decades of the 20th century. Born in 1869, Roussel had shown musical promise as a boy, but chose instead to join the French Navy, seeing active service in Indochina and rising to the rank of Lieutenant. But his naval comrades were impressed by his musicianship, and encouraged him to follow what they saw as his true vocation. In 1894 Roussel resigned his commission, and four years later entered the Schola Cantorum in Paris to study composition. By 1902 he was professor of counterpoint (he went on to teach Satie, Varèse and Martinů). Meanwhile his compositions embraced impressionism, Indian influences (he honeymooned in India in 1909, and completed his Indian-set opera Padmâvatiî in 1923) and, after the First World War, jazz. But Roussel’s mature music is characterised by a colourful, vigorous and very personal neo-classicism—audible in a series of witty, lyrical chamber works for wind instruments. His best-known work, the bracing Third Symphony, dates from this period (1930), but his ballets Le festin de l’araignée (1913) and Bacchus et Ariane (1930) demonstrate his gift for piquant melody, and brought him a worldwide reputation before his death in 1937.