Déodat de Séverac

Déodat de Séverac

Déodat de Séverac (pronounced [deoda də sevəʁak]) (20 July 1872 – 24 March 1921) was a French composer.

Birth home in Saint-Félix-Lauragais.
Tomb of Déodat de Séverac

Life

Born in Saint-Félix-de-Caraman, Haute-Garonne, of aristocratic background, Déodat de Séverac was profoundly influenced by the musical traditions of his native Languedoc.

He studied in Paris under Vincent d'Indy and Albéric Magnard at the Schola Cantorum, an alternative to the training offered by the Paris Conservatoire. He worked as an assistant to Isaac Albéniz and returned to the south of France, where he spent the rest of his rather short life. His opera Héliogabale was produced at Béziers in 1910.

He died in Céret, Pyrénées-Orientales, Roussillon.

Music

Séverac is noted for his vocal and choral music, which includes settings of verse in Provençal (the historic language of Languedoc) and Catalan (the historic language of Roussillon) as well as French poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire. His compositions for solo piano have also won critical acclaim, and many of them were titled as pictorial evocations and published in the collections Chant de la terre, En Languedoc, and En vacances.

A popular example of his work is The Old Musical Box ("Où l'on entend une vieille boîte à musique", from En vacances). His masterpiece, however, is the suite Cerdaña (written 1904—1911), filled with the local color of Languedoc. His motet Tantum ergo is also still sung on occasion.

Selected compositions

Costume for Ida Rubinstein in Séverac's ballet Helene de Troy, sketch by Léon Bakst (1912)

Operas

Works for Piano

Chamber music

Choral music

Songs

References


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.