Pierre-Octave Ferroud (1900 - 1936)

The death of the French composer and conductor Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car accident in 1936 cut short a life of early achievement. He was a pupil of Guy Ropartz and of Florent Schmitt, active at first in Lyons and then in Paris as a leading figure in the promotion of contemporary music.

Orchestral Music
Ferroud shows a debt to Ravel in his orchestral music, developing from early descriptive writing to a more abstract style, in a settled tonal musical language. His Sonnerie pour le Héraut (‘Fanfare for the Herald’) was written for a collaborative radio commission as incidental music to Victor Hugo’s Cromwell, and the suite Chirurgie is taken from a comic opera based on Chekhov.