Marcel Auguste Louis Samuel-Rousseau (

né A birth name is the name of a person given upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name, or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth reg ...

Rousseau; 18 August 1882 – 11 June 1955) was a French composer, organist, and opera director.

Biography

Born in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

, he was the son of Samuel Rousseau and later changed his surname to Samuel-Rousseau to reflect this. He studied composition at the

Paris Conservatoire The Conservatoire de Paris (), also known as the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue ...

and was awarded the

Prix de Rome The Prix de Rome () or Grand Prix de Rome was a French scholarship for arts students, initially for painters and sculptors, that was established in 1663 during the reign of Louis XIV of France. Winners were awarded a bursary that allowed them t ...

in 1905. He was the organist at Saint-Séverin from 1919 to 1922 and president of the

Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM) is a French professional association collecting payments of artists’ rights and distributing the rights to the original songwriters, composers, and music publishers. Founded ...

(SACEM) from 1935 to 1953. For many years he was a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire and artistic director of the Pathé opera company. From 1941 to 1944 he was director of the

Opéra National de Paris The Paris Opera (, ) is the primary opera and ballet company of France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the , and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and officially renamed the , but continued to be k ...

. As a composer, Samuel-Rousseau was highly influenced by the works of Franck and Fauré. He tended to be more conservative in style than many of contemporaries but he was a master at

chromatic harmony Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. In simple terms, within each octave, diatonic music uses only seven different notes, rather than the t ...

and had a strong sense for the dramatic. His compositions include

operas Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libretti ...

ballets Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...

orchestral An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, ce ...

and piano music and

songs A song is a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice. This is often done at distinct and fixed pitches (melodies) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs contain various forms, such as those including the repetition ...

. His best works are his operas, which tend towards the exotic and are ambitious in scale. Two of his operas, ''Le Hulla'' (1920) and ''Kerkeb'' (1931), are based in the

Orient The Orient is a term for the East in relation to Europe, traditionally comprising anything belonging to the Eastern world. It is the antonym of ''Occident'', the Western World. In English, it is largely a metonym for, and coterminous with, the c ...

; with the latter's title role a barber dancer in a harem. His opera ''Tarass Boulba'' (1919) is based on the legend of a Cossack warrior. He also wrote an opera based on the Arthurian legend ''Le Roi Arthur'' (1903). He died in

in 1955, aged 72.

Sources

* Paul Griffiths, Richard Langham Smith, in ''The

New Grove Dictionary of Opera ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera'' is an encyclopedia of opera, considered to be one of the best general reference sources on the subject. It is the largest work on opera in English, and in its printed form, amounts to 5,448 pages in four volu ...

'', edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), and

External links

* 1882 births 1955 deaths 20th-century classical composers Conservatoire de Paris alumni French classical composers French male classical composers French opera composers French opera directors Male opera composers Musicians from Paris Members of the Académie des beaux-arts Prix de Rome for composition 20th-century French male musicians {{france-composer-stub