France has made a huge contribution to the development of classical music. Read on as we run through the greatest French composers, from Couperin and Rameau right through to Messiaen and Boulez.
If the music is immediately appealing, and uses instrumental colour sensitively in an atmospheric or painterly (rather than expressive) manner, the chances are you are hearing a piece by a French composer. They will rarely attempt to storm the heavens in the manner of Beethoven or Mahler (Berlioz is an obvious exception). Indeed, if any French musician shows an interest in the Austro-German tradition, they tend to prefer the pre-Romantics, particularly the suave and understated expressiveness of Mozart, and the playfulness and wit of his colleague Haydn.
Yet a good century before those two composers appeared, French music was the most prestigious in Europe, adorning the court of Louis XIV, the so-called ‘Sun King’, who came to the throne aged four in 1643, and reigned until his death in 1715 (making him to date the longest reigning monarch in history).
It was at Louis XIV’s behest that the palace and gardens of Versailles were built: there, an Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully reigned over all Royal Opera productions and jealously guarded his privileges. We will start with the great, unambiguously French composers who were contemporaries of Lully’s, who managed to survive even under his shadow.
Best French composers : 17th century
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87)
Though in fact born in Florence, Italy, Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87) – composer, dancer, violinist and comedian – can fairly be called the architect of the French national musical style. He became the most powerful musician in France, a true Troubadour of the era, and held a virtual monopoly over court music.
The young Giovanni Battista Lulli was aged just 14 when he was sent to Paris as a ‘garçon de chambre’ to Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, a cousin of Louis XIV who was, somewhat dauntingly, known at court as ‘la Grande Mademoiselle’. Described by his royal mistress as a ‘great dancer’, the boy's talents soon became apparent. On 23 February 1653, Lully found himself dancing with none other than the king in the Ballet de la nuit. The following month he was appointed a court composer and, with a series of successful ballets, established his reputation.
Lully's music is known for its power and energy: lively in the fast movements, deep and emotional in the slower. He is also credited with the invention of the French overture, a musical form used extensively in the Baroque and Classical eras, particularly by Handel and Bach. Lully is perhaps most famed for his operas (he is known as the father of French opera). These include Atys, Armide and Alceste.
Lully died from gangrene after driving a conducting stick through his foot.
Where to start with Lully
Alceste
Judith Van Wanroij, Edwin Crossley-Mercer et al; Les Talens Lyriques/ Christophe Rousset
Aparté AP164
Read our review of Les Talens Lyriques' Alceste.
Marin Marais (1656-1728)
It is only relatively recently that this composer and musician became known to a wider audience through the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, starring Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume. Marin Marais, born in Paris of a humble shoemaker, became a chorister in the Church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, where his musical gifts were quickly appreciated, and he received his earliest instruction playing viol.
Such was the standard he achieved in his playing that, when his voice broke, Marais was able to take lessons with the great Sainte-Colombe. The latter soon realised that his pupil would soon outstrip his own artistry, and when Marais was discovered spying on Saint-Colombe’s practising – hoping to discover some secrets of his master’s technical mastery – he was thrown out.
By the age of 23, Marais was employed as a musician at Louis XIV’s court, and in 1679 was appointed joueur de viole de la musique de Chambre, a truly exalted position. It is largely through Marais’ meticulously annotated instruction manuals and manuscripts that we know so much about the Baroque art of viol playing. Whether accompanied or playing solo, Marais’ music for viol is truly glorious.
Where to start with Marin Marais
Pièces de Viole, Cinquième livre
Lei Henrikson (bass viol), Lars-Erik Larsson (theorbo)
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729)
The daughter of an organ builder, Élisabeth Jacquet (de la Guerre was added to her name when she married the organist Marin de la Guerre) showed phenomenal gifts from an early age, gaining public recognition by the age of six. At ten years old, she was hailed as ‘a wonder’ by the journal Mecure galant: ‘She sings at sight the most difficult music. She accompanies herself, and others who wish to sing, at the harpsichord, when she plays in an inimitable manner. She composes pieces and plays them in all the keys asked of her.’
So impressed was Louis XIV that he placed her in the care of his then mistress, Mme de Montespan, and consistently encouraged her career. Several manuscripts of her works from the 1690s, including of solo and trio sonatas, have survived; and one of her surviving operas, Cephale et Procris, originally performed in Paris at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1694, was revived with huge success in 1989. Her name stands proud with any of her greatest contemporary French composers, and deserves to be better known today.
We named Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre one of the greatest female composers ever
Where to start with Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
Chamber music
Musica Fiorita, Daniela Dolci (harpsichord)
Pan Classics PC10333
François Couperin (1668-1733)
Known as Couperin le Grand to distinguish him from other members of his musically talented family, François Couperin is legendary among French composers of the Baroque era (in his honour, Maurice Ravel, almost 200 years after Couperin’s death, named his neo-Baroque suite Le Tombeau de Couperin). Couperin was chief harpsichordist and organist at the court of Louis XIV, and while serving that monarch composed sacred music, chamber music and, above all, several volumes of keyboard works.
His most performed ‘hit’ is the enigmatically titled ‘Les Baricades mistérieuses’ (The mysterious barriers), possibly referring to the fact that its beguiling melody forever straddles across the bar-lines. Though originally written for harpsichord, it works beautifully on lute or the modern guitar – which might be preferred by those yet to acquire a taste for harpsichord. Couperin’s sacred music is also beautiful and well worth hearing, as are his Nouveaux Concerts.
Where to start with Couperin
Nouveaux Concerts
Thomas Indermühnle (oboe), Henk de Wit (bassoon), Ursula Dütschler (harpsichord)
Camerata CM 15045-6
Best French composers : 18th century
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)
While Ravel in the 20th century paid homage to Couperin, Ravel’s contemporary Claude Debussy paid homage to Jean-Philippe Rameau – both in writing and in his music. Having watched a performance of Rameau’s opera Castor et Pollux, Debussy described his music as ‘compounded of a delicate and charming tenderness, precise accentuation, strict declamation in recitative, without that German affectation of profundity or the need to double underline everything or explain everything’.
Rameau is today most widely remembered as an opera composer, yet he began his career as a prodigiously gifted harpsichord and organ player, studying in Italy as a teenager before working in numerous provincial French towns as an organist. A man of formidable intelligence – he corresponded with Voltaire on a wide variety of subjects – his music is both immediate in its expressive communication yet far from predictable, its harmonic strangeness and adventurous nature evident whether played on harpsichord or piano.
Rameau came to opera late, his first – Hippolyte et Aricie – being staged when he was 50. This already shows Rameau as a consummate composer for the stage, though his most successful and today most often performed and recorded work is Les Indes galantes (1735), a colourful, anti-colonialist masterpiece.
Where to start with Rameau
Cantates profanes & Pièces en concerts Nos. 1, 3 & 5
Solistes De l'Ensemble Baroque De Limoges/Christophe Coin (viol)
Erato Veritas 2435615405
And...
Les Indes galantes
Purcell Choir, Orfeo Orchestra/György Vashegyi
Glossa GCD924005
Best French composers : early 19th century
Hector Berlioz (1803-69)
Though in many ways atypical of French composers, the impact Hector Berlioz has had on music outside France – most particularly in Russia – is such that no selection of major French composers could be without him. He was a fiery Romantic who embraced the extremes of human experience.
That fire and passion are evident most famously in his Symphonie fantastique, but also in his dramatic oratorio La damnation de Faust and even his Requiem – he also furthered the limpid expressiveness of Gluck (a bête noire of Debussy’s) in many of his songs and arias.
Where to start with Berlioz
La damnation de Faust
Michael Spyres (Faust), Joyce DiDonato (Marguerite); Coro Gulbenkian; Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra/John Nelson
Erato 9029541735
Louise Farrenc (1804-75)
On first hearing, a good deal of Louise Farrenc’s work – especially her chamber music, similar in style to that of Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn – might appear to exemplify the well-mannered, ‘lady-like’ salon composer. This fact may be why her creative talent was more readily accepted by the French establishment than were that of many other women of her time.
A pupil of Anton Reicha (himself a former pupil of Beethoven’s and one of the top composition teachers of the time), Farrenc was also an outstanding pianist. In 1842, she was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, a post she held until her retirement in 1873 – the only woman to hold such a position at that institute during the 19th century.
Her music, while building on the achievements of Mozart and Beethoven, has a subtlety which anticipates that of her compatriot Gabriel Fauré later that century. Farrenc demonstrated mastery of the sonata form in three symphonies and her many chamber music works including two piano trios, and her abundance of piano music, while much of it is comparable to the best of Mendelssohn’s, also shows a distinctly individual and sometimes quite fierce voice such as in the Etudes Op. 26.
By the way, Louise Farrenc's Third Symphony gets performed at the 2024 BBC Proms. It's being performed for Prom 72, which takes place on Friday 13 September, alongside Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, the legendary Eroica.
Where to start with Louise Farrenc
Piano Works
Konstanze Eickhorst (piano)
CPO 9998792
And..
Piano Trio, Op. 33; Sextet, Op. 40, etc
Linos Ensemble
CPO 7772562
Charles Gounod (1818-93)
Like Farrenc, Charles Gounod studied composition under Reicha, and seemed set on a brilliant career, not only winning the prestigious Prix de Rome but also praise from such diverse musicians as Berlioz and Mendelssohn. Yet even in his lifetime, his reputation was eclipsed. Of his dozen operas, he is today only widely remembered for Faust (1859), an international hit in its time.
Though it has some of the trappings of Romantic Grand Opera, it includes several moments of distinctly French charm – such as Marguerite’s ‘Jewel Song’ (made notorious by Hergé’s ‘Milanese nightingale’ Bianca Castafiore, who regularly inflicts her interpretation of this showpiece aria), and the charming ‘Faites-lui mes aveux’ sung by the lovesick Siébel (Ravel, in a pianistic double tribute, paraphrased that aria in the style of Chabrier).
Something of Gounod’s versatility and range may be gathered from his two symphonies, composed in the 1850s, the ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, composed while he was living in London in the 1870s and later made famous by its use in the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents…, and the Ave Maria, the melody of which he added to Bach’s Prelude in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Where to start with Gounod
Faust
Benjamin Bernheim, Véronique Gens, Andrew Foster-Williams; Les Talens Lyriques/Christophe Rousset
Bru Zane BZ1037
Jacques Offenbach (1819-80)
Possibly there are still some naysayers out there who claim Offenbach, a German Jew born in Cologne, has no business to be considered one of the ‘top French composers’.
But Jacob (as he was named) proved so prodigiously gifted as a cellist that his father was persuaded that he and his equally talented brother, Julius, should study at the prestigious Conservatoire in Paris. Offenbach was soon bored by the Conservatoire’s staid regime, and sagged off after his first year.
He found employment instead as a cellist at the Opéra-Comique. Unable to fulfil his ambitions as a composer there, he broke loose and ultimately formed his own Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens.
After writing several one-act operettas, Offenbach's first full-length operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld (no less an artist than Gustav Doré providing its scenery), got a hostile review, condemning the work for its profanity and lack of reverence – which only stirred even greater public interest and turned it into a huge box office success. Its most famous number, now known as the can-can, was originally entitled ‘Galop infernal’: it was only when adopted by the Moulin Rouge that it became associated with the high kicking and acrobatic chorus-line of girls.
Offenbach’s great masterpiece, though, is his opera The Tales of Hoffmann. By the time of his death, he managed to complete the piano score, but had only orchestrated the overture and the first act. Its most famous number is the Barcorolle, ‘Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour’, one of the most seductive numbers in all opera.
Where to start with Offenbach
Offenbach Colorature
Jodie Devos (soprano), Adèle Charvet (mezzo-soprano), Munich Radio Orchestra/Laurent Campellone
Alpha ALPHA 437
Best French composers : later 19th century
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Rather like Louise Farrenc's above, Saint-Saëns’s music is quite deceptive. He adored Mozart, and his compositions often aspire to the understated elegance of that Austrian composer. Yet he also took pleasure in the theatrical devilries of Franz Liszt, and in the wild inventiveness of such Russians as Mussorgsky (while also becoming a close friend of Tchaikovsky’s).
That he enjoyed playing with the theatrical trappings of the Romantic pianist-composer is evident in his Piano Concerto No. 2, which even quotes to doom-laden chords from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, whose anti-hero is consigned to hell for his refusal to repent of his misdeeds.
Saint-Saëns was also unostentatiously adventurous: his Piano Concerto No. 5, inspired by his holidays in north Africa, later inspired Ravel with its unusual orchestral effects. Yet Saint-Saëns was capable of writing tenderly lyrical music: most famously ‘The Swan’ in Carnival of the Animals, and also La muse et le poète – a work which has a strong affinity with the work of his beloved pupil, Gabriel Fauré.
We named Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5 one of the greatest piano concertos of all time.
Where to start with Saint-Saëns
The 5 Piano Concertos, etc
Jean-Philippe Collard; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/André Previn
Warner Classics 586 2452
And...
La Muse et le Poète
Renaud Capuçon (violin), Gautier Capuçon (cello); Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Lionel Bringuier
Erato 9341342
Léo Delibes (1836-91)
Besides Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky also admired the ballets of Delibes, and indeed met the composer during his 1888 visit to Paris, describing him as among ‘the young musicians…most likeable of all’. Though Delibes wrote several operas, of which Lakmé is the most famous (the Flower Duet being made famous when appropriated by British Airways as its theme tune), it is above all his ballets Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876 – including a famous ‘Pizzicati’, used in Babe as our hero attempts to steal the ‘mechanical rooster’) through which his name endures.
- We named the Flower Duet from Delibes's Lakmé one of the greatest songs about flowers
In these two ballets, Delibes wrote music that was inventive, charming, sophisticated (including the use of leitmotifs in Sylvia) and brilliantly orchestrated in a manner unprecedented in the genre, which inspired Tchaikovsky when composing his ballet masterpieces The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
Where to start with Delibes
Coppélia; La Source (Ballet Suites)
Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Mogrelia
Naxos 8.553356-57
Georges Bizet (1838-75)
Bizet died just as he had composed his first great hit, the opera Carmen, with the promise of far greater achievements. A pupil of Charles Gounod, whose symphonies were clearly a model for his own Symphony in C, Bizet wrote his most enduring works in the 1870s.
First came Jeux d’enfants, originally for piano duet but now most famous in the form of an orchestral suite arranged from five of the original 12 movements. Then followed his pithy yet richly evocative incidental music to the play L’Arlésienne, from which he himself made a four-movement suite (its Adagietto surely an inspiration behind Mahler’s famous slow movement to the Fifth Symphony). Finally, his great operatic masterpiece Carmen, with its defiant and fiercely independent heroine whose misfortune is to get entangled with a very serious and unworldly soldier who cannot move on when their relationship ends.
Where to start with Bizet
L’Arlésienne Orchestral Suites
Chœur de l’opéra de Lyon; Les Musiciens du Louvre/Marc Minkowski
Naïve V5130
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-94)
The most exuberant member of the Parisian circle that formed around the Belgian composer César Franck, Chabrier made several attempts to become a ‘serious’ composer, including a would-be Wagnerian opera Gwendoline. But he was most himself when writing carefree and light-hearted music, whether for his instrument, the piano, or for orchestra (most famously España). His music was to be greatly admired by Poulenc as well as Stravinsky in the next century.
Where to start with Chabrier
Orchestral works
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande/Neeme Järvi
Chandos CHSA5122
Best French composers: the golden age of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Fauré’s music is generally softly spoken – as was the man himself – the very antithesis of the muscular heroism of a Beethoven. His most famous work, the Requiem, was written he said to ‘console the living’, and breaks convention by not harping on the theme of divine judgement. Fauré’s greatest achievement was in the realm of song, including the song cycle La bonne chanson and such beguiling gems as ‘Les roses d’Ispahan’ and ‘Après une rêve’.
His chamber music, once you have tuned in to his understated style, has as much emotional power as any of his late-Romantic peers in Germany. Though he wrote relatively little for orchestra, several suites derived from his incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, Shylock, and Masques et bergamasques are fine alternative introductions to Fauré’s gentle, understated style.
Where to start with Fauré
Songs, Vol. 4
Jennifer Smith, Felicity Lott, Geraldine McGreevy (soprano), Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (tenor), Stephen Varcoe (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67336
And...
Pelléas et Mélisande; Masques et bergamasques; Pavane; Ballade
Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne/Armin Jordan
Warner Classics 9029544112
Jules Massenet (1848-1912)
Massenet is most widely known for the beguiling ‘Méditation’ for solo violin and orchestra, taken from his opera Thaïs. This is just the tip of a huge iceberg of operatic talent that once commanded the stage at the height of that once great French tradition, Grand Opera.
Hollywood reflected a smidgen of that reputation in Marathon Man, the thriller starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, when an agent (played by Roy Schieder) has a rendezvous at the Paris Opéra, arriving to the sinister strains of ‘Dors, O cité perverse’ from Massenet’s now rarely heard opera Hérodiade.
Of Massenet’s more than thirty operas, two – neither belonging to the Grand Opera tradition – have had more enduring success: Manon (1884) has been described as encapsulating the charm and vitality of the Parisian Belle Époque; while Werther (1887), based on Goethe, presents a tragic love story. Perhaps Massenet’s greatest and certainly most enduring success, though, was as a teacher: his composition pupils included Gustave Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Pierné.
Where to start with Massenet
Manon
Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna; Opera de la Monnaie/Antonio Pappano
EMI/Warner Classics 456 3892
Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931)
Vincent d’Indy was part of César Franck’s circle and was effectively the unacknowledged godfather of the group of composers known as Les Six. His pupils included Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric (whose irreverence was quite contrary to his teacher’s sober sensibility and religious devotion), and Erik Satie, the official ‘godfather’ of Les Six. Both Auric and Satie studied under d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, the institution he himself had founded in 1894 as France’s major alternative centre of higher music education to rival the Paris Conservatoire.
D’Indy’s activities as composer and teacher were complemented by his work as a scholar, researching and editing what was then considered early music: he presented the first modern performances of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, Castor et Pollux and Dardanus.
Though a leading composer of his generation, with at least two major operas to his credit, two very fine string quartets and a deal of piano music, d’Indy’s reputation in that field was eclipsed not long after his death in 1931. Possibly this was due to his right-wing and especially his anti-Semitic views, though these did not affect his professional relations with Jewish colleagues – he held Paul Dukas in high regard, who in turn hailed d’Indy as ‘One of the greatest French musicians’; yet by the 1940s they were sufficient grounds for many, including Pierre Boulez, to reject his work out of hand.
Just 20 years after d’Indy’s death, only three of his works were at all known even in d’Indy’s own country: a set of orchestral variations, Istar; the symphonic poem, Jour d’été à la montagne; and his earliest masterpiece, Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français.
Where to start with d'Indy
Orchestral works, Vol. 5
Louis Lortie (piano); Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Rumon Gamba
Chandos CHAN 10760
Ernest Chausson (1855-99)
Ernest Chausson is perhaps best known for Poème, his fragrantly poignant piece for solo violin and orchestra. Born to a wealthy family, Chausson began his career as a lawyer. Depite this, music held him in thrall. On meeting the composer Vincent d’Indy he was drawn into the circle of the Belgian composer César Franck.
He became harmonically adventurous, on one hand admiring Wagner, and on the other sharing an enthusiasm for Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov with his close friend Debussy.
Chausson’s career was cut short by his premature death from crashing into a wall while going downhill on his bicycle at speed. It may have been deliberate, as Chausson suffered from episodes of depression. He left one symphony, one major opera – Le roi Arthus – and a wealth of songs and other vocal works. His lush Poème de l'amour et de la mer for voice and orchestra is a masterpiece which deserves wider recognition.
Where to start with Chausson
Poème de l'amour et de la mer; Symphony
Véronique Gens (soprano); Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch
Alpha ALPHA 441
And...
Poème for violin and orchestra
James Ehnes (violin); Quebec Symphony Orchestra/Yoav Talmi
Analekta FL 23151
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Debussy was both a sensualist and a perfectionist. Though he hated being defined as an ‘impressionist’, he shared with those painters an extraordinary ability to translate different qualities of natural lighting into his work, whether the dazzling sunshine of his piano showpiece L’isle joyeuse, or the ominous clouds which define an otherwise clear night sky in ‘Nuages’, the opening movement of his orchestral Nocturnes.
He also delighted in sonority for its own sake, divorced from the academic necessities of resolution: in this, he found common ground in Javanese gamelan and in Musorgsky’s extraordinary use of bell-like harmony in the Coronation scene of Boris Godunov. The harmonic world he created from all these ingredients was uniquely his, until his music inspired a host of imitators. Yet none of them quite achieved the limpid perfection of his final sonatas, most particularly the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp.
A huge figure in the history of classical music., Debussy finishes strongly in our list of the 50 greatest composers of all time.
Where to start with Debussy
Piano works
Angela Hewitt
Hyperion CDA 67898
And...
Three Late Sonatas
Isabelle Faust (violin), Magali Mosnier (flute), Antoine Tamestit (viola), Alexander Melnikov (piano), Xavier de Maistre (harp), etc.
Harmonia Mundi HMM902303
Albéric Magnard (1865-1914)
He's less well known than many of the other grand names on this list, but Albéric Magnard desrves his place in any rundown of great French composers. His work, with its structural complexity, intricate craftsmanship, and emotional profundity, has sometimes got Magnard labelled the 'French Bruckner'. Certainly, his style blends the more lyrical idiom typical of the French school of composers, with a more Germanic sense of rigour and structure. In this respect, Franck and Brahms are also immediate reference points for much of his work. Try the FOurth Symphony to get a taste of Magnard...
Erik Satie (1866-1925)
After a rather strict, bourgeois upbringing, French composer Erik Satie became a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire. He was soon expelled for unsatisfactory work. He started his career as a café pianist at various establishments, including Le Chat Noir in the city’s bohemian Montmartre district.
While there he wrote some saucy cabaret songs including ‘Je te veux’ and ‘La diva de l’empire’. He also wrote his three Gymnopédies for solo piano. These are timeless, limpid melodies with the simplest accompaniment. They were the total antithesis of the late-Romanticism of Franck and his circle.
Satie became friends with Debussy, had his piano pieces championed by Ravel, and for a while was the spiritual godfather of the rising young French composers known as Les Six – until two of their members, Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc, offended him by sending him a baby rattle on which they had drawn a face and glued on a beard in caricature of Satie’s appearance.
Satie wrote mostly short, pithy pieces. Exceptions include his Dada-ist ballet score for Diaghilev, Parade, which includes parts for typewriter, steamship whistle and siren. Much more sober in tone is his ‘symphonic drama’, Socrate (first completed in 1918, subsequently revised at least twice) which he described as ‘a return to classical simplicity with a modern sensibility’.
Where to start with Satie
Piano Music, Vol. 1
Noriko Ogawa (piano)
BIS 2215
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Long regarded – mostly without justification – as a would-be rival of fellow French composer Debussy’s, Ravel is now recognised as a great master in his own right. While he deeply admired Debussy’s orchestral Nocturnes, which influenced some of his works such as Rapsodie espagnole, he had earlier relished the works of Chabrier and Satie, and later took an interest in other composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky (a personal friend), Béla Bartók and George Gershwin, borrowing ideas and transforming them into his own style.
Stravinsky once described him as ‘the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers’ – every one of Ravel’s works is indeed fastidiously crafted with not a wasted note or effect. His music exemplifies ‘art concealing art’: the lovely and ever-growing melody that opens the slow movement of his G major Piano Concerto sounds like an inspired improvisation – yet Ravel confessed ‘That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’
Where to start with Ravel
Piano works
Steven Osborne
Hyperion CDA 67731/2
And...
Piano Concertos
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano); BBC Symphony Orchestra/Yan Pascal Tortelier
Chandos CHSA 5084
Best French composers: 20th century
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
Lili Boulanger was one of the most prodigiously gifted and powerful of young voices among French composers who came to maturity in the second decade of the 20th century. Tragically, she suffered poor health. Weakened by bronchial pneumonia when she was two, she died aged only 24 from Crohn’s disease.
Yet in her few years she left several great masterpieces, including the cantata Faust et Hélène with which, aged 19, she won the Prix de Rome – the first female composer to do so – and the song cycle Clairières dans le Ciel. Several of her later works are understandably fraught in character, yet there is also a good deal of sunshine to be found in her earlier choral works such as Les sirènes.
Where to start with Lili Boulanger
Faust et Hélène, Psalms etc.
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus, BBC Philharmonic/Yan Pascal Tortelier
Chandos CHAN 9745
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Poulenc’s earliest hit were three piano pieces, Trois mouvements perpétuels, impudent musical doodles written under the influence of Stravinsky and Satie. He was long underestimated by many of his peers, who couldn’t see beyond the clowning mixed with sentimentality in so many of his works.
But gradually a more profound expression became evident. First, this occurred through his art songs, in which his genius shone brightest. The strongly contrasting Deux Poems de Louis Aragon, composed when Paris had fallen to Nazi Germany, are a fine introduction. His religious works, starting with Litanies à la Vierge Noire, were later composed after the shock of a colleague’s death.
He also wrote several unconventional operas. The surreal Les Mamelles de Tirésias is one such opera, a wild roller-coaster through a wide variety of styles. It travels from the music hall (think Folies Bergère) to devoutly religious – demonstrating Poulenc’s range. By the end of his life, he was admired by such different composers as Stravinsky and Britten.
Where to start with Poulenc
Gloria; motets
Susan Gritton (soprano); Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge; Britten Sinfonia/Stephen Layton
Hyperion CDA 67623
And...
Deux Poèmes de Louis Aragon and other songs
Régine Crespin (soprano), John Wustman (piano)
Decca 475 7712
- We named Régine Crespin one of the greatest sopranos of all time
Olivier Messiaen (1908-92)
Like the Russian composer Scriabin, the mystical Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen radically transformed his music through his assimilation and invention of modes well outside the standard Western tradition. Messiaen even formulated these modes, derived partly from his own studies of such modernists as Stravinsky and Bartók, but perhaps most strikingly from traditional music from the Andes, Bali, India and Japan. He then described them in a textbook, Technique of my musical language (1944).
Common to the modes he favoured were their inclusion of the tritone, a pair of notes conventionally considered dissonant and even evil – therefore known as the diabolus in musica – but which Messiaen considered to be divine. That interval flavours nearly all his music from the 1930s onwards. To this, the French composer added his growing obsession with birdsong. He meticulously notated and included this in his music from the 1940s.
What truly makes Messiaen’s music, though, is his chef-like flair in making truly exotic and flavoursome musical dishes out of these ingredients.
Perhaps most startling is his organ music. It is by turns wild and exuberant, or eerily still yet glowing with unusual harmonies. It is quite unlike anything that had been created before for that venerable instrument. Messiaen was organist at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris from 1931 until his death: it was the organ which became the crucible for some of his most extraordinary musical adventures and innovations.
Where to start with Messiaen
Organ works
Simon Preston (organ)
Eloquence 482 4917
Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013)
Though a winner of the Prix de Rome in 1938, Dutilleux’s misfortune was to come to maturity just as the Second World War broke out. His subsequent career was overshadowed by the more obviously ‘modern’ music by Messiaen and his pupils. Pierre Boulez was one such pupil.
But lately, there has been a groundswell of appreciation from a younger generation of musicians. This was particularly prevalent from the late 1960s onwards. Mstislav Rostropovich was a champion of his music, having previously commissioned the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain…, a major contribution to the repertoire.
Richard Rodney Bennett was another key champion, and Dutilleux’s music is now enjoying a renaissance of appreciation. Several fine recent recordings to explore include John Wilson’s BBC Music Magazine Award-winning account of Le Loup. This resurgence of interest has reminded us that Dutilleux was indeed one of the great French composers.
Where to start with Dutilleux
Correspondances; Tout un monde lointain…, etc
Barbara Hannigan (soprano), Anssi Karttunen (cello); Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Esa-Pekka Salonen
Deutsche Grammophon 479 1180
And..
Le Loup
Sinfonia of London/John Wilson
Chandos CHSA 5263
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
A pupil of Messiaen’s, Boulez was provocative and confrontational in his youth. In 1945, he organised a group of students to boo and disrupt the French premiere of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods. He also pointedly turned his back on Dutilleux at the premiere of the latter’s First Symphony. Oh, and he called for the demolition of all opera houses. Violence was a persistent theme of his early works, such as Le Visage nuptial, Le Soleil des eaux and his Piano Sonata No. 2.
After this brutalist phase, Boulez began to explore ground common to that of his great forebears Debussy and Ravel: Le Marteau sans maître (1955) is scored for soprano and an ensemble of alto flute, viola, guitar and percussion instruments including various types of mallet percussion (vibraphone, xylorimba, etc), claves, bongos and maracas.
This was followed by Pli selon pli (1963, then revised several times), again for soprano and an augmented version of the ensemble used in the earlier work. This time though, there was the notable addition of piano, harps and brass instruments.
By the 1960s, Boulez was part of the establishment, much in demand as a conductor – including several engagements at Wagner’s festival in Bayreuth. In 1970 the French government invited Boulez to create the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) with generous state subsidy. By the end of his career, he was writing remarkably idiomatic pieces such as Anthemes I for solo violin.
Where to start with Boulez
Pli selon pli
Christine Schäfer (soprano); Ensemble InterContemporain/Pierre Boulez
Deutsche Grammophon 471 344
Pascal Dusapin (b. 1955)
Like many of his generation brought up in the age of the LP, Dusapin developed a wide-ranging music taste, embracing free jazz and The Doors as much as Beethoven and Bach in his childhood. At the age of 18, he heard Arcana by Edgard Varèse and decided to become a composer.
He studied under Iannis Xenakis in the 1970s, and in his own music has been breaking boundaries ever since. Eerie, dramatic yet curiously familiar, his music readily communicates but is ever unpredictable.
Where to start with Dusapin
Wenn Du Dem Wind…; Aufgang; À quia
Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire/Pascal Rophé
BIS BIS 2262
And...
Morning in Long Island
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Myung-Whun Chung
Deutsche Grammophon 481 0814
