1869–1937 · France
Albert Roussel (1869–1937) was a French composer who began as a career naval officer, spending years at sea before turning to music full-time only in his forties. He moved from early Impressionism to a personal, rhythmically taut neoclassical style, writing symphonies, ballets and the opera Padmâvatî. For players today, his "medium+" level piano pieces are a good way in.
Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel was born on 5 April 1869 in Tourcoing, in the north of France, into a family of wealthy textile manufacturers. The Roussels were an educated and well-established family: one of Albert's ancestors sat in the Estates-General of 1789, and his grandfather served for decades as mayor of his home town.
The future composer's childhood was marked by loss: he lost his father in infancy and his mother at the age of seven. He then spent four years living with his grandfather, and, after the grandfather's death, another four years with his mother's sister. Despite his relatives' care, Albert often felt lonely and read widely; his favourite author was Jules Verne, whose novels stirred a longing for sea voyages. He often spent summers at the Belgian seaside, and at home he took piano lessons from an elderly organist at the local church.
At fifteen, Roussel went to Paris to finish his schooling at the Collège Stanislas. In 1887, after passing his final exams, he entered the naval academy, placing sixteenth among six hundred candidates. Already during a training voyage on the sailing frigate Mélpomène, the future officer put together a small orchestra and choir from fellow midshipmen, who played at Sunday services, sometimes slipping tunes he remembered from Paris into the church music.
Once commissioned, Roussel served on a cruiser, then on the gunboat Styx, which took him on a long voyage through the southern seas of the Far East. In 1889–1890 he was part of the crew of the frigate Iphigénie and took part in a round-the-world expedition. It was then that he wrote his first pieces — a Fantaisie for violin and piano and an Andante for violin, viola, cello and organ — though his grasp of musical theory was still modest.
Chance played a part in pushing him toward a professional career: a fellow officer, the brother of a well-known opera singer, promised to show Roussel's pieces to professionals and returned from leave reporting they had made a strong impression. Years later, once Roussel was an established composer, the friend admitted he had simply forgotten his promise and had shown the pieces to no one — but by then it no longer mattered.
In 1894, back from a long voyage, Roussel took extended leave and spent it with relatives in Roubaix, devoting his free time to music theory. He asked the director of the Roubaix conservatory, Julien Koszul, for private lessons; Koszul, seeing the young officer's first attempts, urged him to show them to the Paris professor Eugène Gigout. Gigout's response was encouraging enough that Roussel decided to leave the navy, resigning in September 1894.
From October 1894 Roussel lived in Paris and studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Gigout, working through Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. The strict training gave him a clear, almost classical way of thinking, and he kept a lasting gratitude toward his teacher, later writing about him at length in his memoirs.
In all, Roussel spent fifteen years on his musical education: he began at twenty-five and did not finish until he was forty. In 1898, well prepared after four years with Gigout, he entered the newly opened Schola Cantorum, in Vincent d'Indy's class of polyphony, orchestration and free composition.
D'Indy quickly recognised the new student's unusual grasp of polyphony, made him his assistant, and later invited him to lead the counterpoint and fugue class himself. From 1902 Roussel taught polyphony at the school while continuing to study other subjects with d'Indy for several more years.
Roussel taught the counterpoint class at the Schola Cantorum for twelve years. His students included Erik Satie, Edgard Varèse, Paul Le Flem and Alexis Roland-Manuel, as well as foreign musicians such as the Czech Bohuslav Martinů and the Romanian Stan Golestan. Satie, though three years older than his teacher, recalled the classes fondly years later and called Roussel a friend.
In the autumn of 1909 Roussel finally made a long-held dream come true, travelling to India with his wife on a carefully planned journey through the country's ancient cities. The impressions from the trip fed into the symphonic triptych Évocations, for soloists, chorus and orchestra, first performed in Paris on 18 May 1912 and bringing Roussel wide recognition.
Almost as successful was his one-act ballet-pantomime Le festin de l'araignée, staged at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris on 3 April 1913: instead of the eight planned performances it was given twenty-two times before the season ended. The symphonic suite Roussel drew from the ballet is still performed today alongside works by Debussy, Dukas and Ravel. At the end of 1913 the Paris Opéra commissioned Roussel to write an opera on a subject of his own choosing, and he again turned to India, basing it on a medieval legend about a faithful wife named Padmâvatî.
The First World War interrupted work on the new opera after just six months. Roussel was forty-five, and the draft board rejected him for active service on health grounds, but he volunteered for the Red Cross and spent nearly two years as an ambulance driver near the front. He later managed to transfer closer to the front line, serving as a transport officer in the artillery and taking part in the fighting in Champagne, on the Somme and at Verdun.
In January 1918 Roussel was finally discharged on medical grounds, and only in the summer of that year, once his health had recovered, did he return to composing Padmâvatî. He never went back to teaching at the Schola Cantorum, though he continued to advise younger musicians who sought him out. The opera's premiere at the Paris Opéra on 1 June 1923 was a major success, and despite the difficulty and expense of staging it, Padmâvatî returned to the stage several more times in later years.
In 1920 Roussel bought a house in Normandy, close to the sea, where he spent most of his remaining seventeen years. Through the 1920s he and Maurice Ravel were regarded as the leaders of French music, and once Ravel's illness drew him away from active musical life, Roussel remained effectively the sole leading figure. In the following decade he headed the French section of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
Roussel's last long journey was not eastward, as in earlier years, but to America, where a concert tour met with great success. In 1930, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, he wrote his Third Symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's anniversary — one of his strongest works.
In the spring of 1937, as his heart condition worsened, Roussel followed his doctors' advice and went to rest at the seaside resort of Royan. On 13 August he was forced to interrupt work on a wind trio for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, and on 23 August 1937 he died of a heart attack. Roussel died the same year as his fellow musicians Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Pierné.
Roussel's creative path was never fixed to one manner: beginning under the influence of Wagner and Franck, he then took up Debussy's Impressionism and an interest in the East, later the sharp rhythms of Stravinsky, before ending his career as one of the leading figures of French neoclassicism. Roussel himself explained these shifts not as a matter of fashion but as a search for a more precise and expressive musical language.
Roussel himself divided his path into three periods. The first, from 1898 to 1913, he loosely called Impressionist, though the music of these years carries no less of an Eastern imprint than Debussyan traits. To this period belong the cheerful Divertissement for piano and wind quintet, Op. 6, the First Symphony, The Poem of the Forest, Op. 7, and the ballet-pantomime Le festin de l'araignée, Op. 17. Roussel dated his second period from 1918 to 1925: the music of these years grows harsher in rhythm and drier in writing, with the opera Padmâvatî as the bridge between the old manner and the new.
A constant source of renewal for him was the East: during his travels he came to know Indian, Cambodian and Indonesian music, and later wove characteristic modal turns into his scores — not as exotic colour but as a way of enriching the harmony. His years of study at the Schola Cantorum, where Palestrina and Bach were the models, left his music with a dense contrapuntal texture: Roussel's orchestration sounds heavier and thicker than that of contemporaries such as Fauré or Debussy, and by temperament he always remained closer to classicism.
The most valuable part of Roussel's legacy is his stage works together with his four symphonies and a sinfonietta: the symphony as a genre was something of a rarity in early twentieth-century French music, and Roussel's example encouraged younger composers such as Honegger, Milhaud, Dutilleux and Sauguet to take it up. Among his stage works, the opera-ballet Padmâvatî, the ballets Le festin de l'araignée and Bacchus et Ariane, and the orchestral Flemish Rhapsody stand out. Roussel did not overlook jazz either: in 1929 he wrote a piece for voice and piano called Jazz dans la nuit.
The site carries piano pieces by Roussel at the "medium+" level: the cycle Des Heures Passent, Op. 1, Rustiques, Op. 5, Suite, Op. 14, and Sonatine, Op. 16. These are compact solo pieces — a good way to get to know Roussel's dense, rhythmically clear piano writing before moving on to his orchestral scores.