Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray was a French Breton composer, pianist, and professor of music history/theory at the Conservatoire de Paris as well as a Prix de Rome laureate. He was born at Nantes and died at Vernouillet, near Dreux. Debussy was one of his protégés.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray.

From the period sources

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, born into a prosperous family, initially pursued a legal career, becoming a lawyer in 1859, yet was “possessed by the love of music,” having studied under M. Champommier in his native Nantes (Biographie universelle des musiciens, 1880). Upon arriving in Paris, he entered Ambroise Thomas’s class at the Conservatoire and swiftly won the first Grand Prix de composition musicale in 1862 with his cantata Louise de Mézières. His Stabat Mater, performed in 1868, was “fort bien accueilli par la critique” (Biographie universelle des musiciens, 1880).

With financial independence, Bourgault-Ducoudray dedicated himself to music, developing an “enthusiastic passion” for the works of Handel and Bach, which he noted were “complétement inconnues” to the French public (Biographie universelle des musiciens, 1880). To remedy this, he founded an amateur choral society in Paris, through which he introduced works like Handel’s Alexander’s Feast and Bach cantatas. He also undertook musical missions to Greece and Brittany, publishing “interesting notes” and collections of folk melodies, such as his Trente Mélodies populaires de la Grèce et de l’Orient (Biographie universelle des musiciens, 1880). In these collections, he advanced a theory that modal songs, found across various nations, represent a survival of music common to the early Indo-European race, adopting Greek rather than ecclesiastical nomenclature for the modes (Grove’s Dictionary, 1922). From 1878, he lectured on music history at the Conservatoire (Grove’s Dictionary, 1904).