Albert Roussel

Albert Roussel was born in Tourcoing, a French town near Lille, practically on the border with Belgium, in 1869. Though his family is described as 'prosperous industrial', his parents died when he was a young child and he was swiftly packed off to be brought up first by his paternal grandfather and, subsequently, by an uncle. Aged 15, he was sent to school in Paris, where his first love was mathematics, though a generalist music education was part of the curriculum, too. As a young adult, he joined the navy and saw active service in Indo-China in the mid-1890s. It was during his spare time at sea that he began to compose.

Having resigned his naval commission, he took private music lessons from the likes of d'Indy. He went on to teach, in turn, composers such as Satie and Martinů.

His early works indicate a fascination with the impressionism of Debussy, seasoned with the eastern influences he had admired during his journeys throughout Asia. His health broke down in the 1920s and he retired to the Normandy coast (where he was eventually buried), and his music picked up a distinctly neo-classical bent, characterised by rhythmic precision (sometimes influenced by jazz), astringent, almost polytonal, harmonies and linear contrapuntalism -almost a direct reaction against his early impressionism.

He left a substantial body of work, of which perhaps his ballets are the most significant, especially Bacchus et Ariane. There are also four symphonies (of which the last two are generally held in high esteem).

Roussel died in 1937, of a heart attack, aged 80. His music thereafter slipped out of fashion and into obscurity -whence it was partly rescued, starting around the early 1980s. American music critic Bernard Holland thus wrote in 2006 that, “Roussel remains almost famous, his work just beyond the pool of repertory universally drawn from. His music, said another way, walks the line between the memorable and the impossible to forget. The writing sets unrelated keys against one another but eventually seeks strong tonal centers; in other words, it can bark and growl but in the end wags its tail.”

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