(b Cadenet, 13 April 1810; d St Germain-en-Laye, 29 Aug 1876). French composer. He may be regarded as second only to Berlioz among French composers of his time. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1831 he joined the Saint-Simonians and began composing choruses for their ceremonials; when the cult was disbanded (1832) he went to the orient to preach their gospel, finding a powerful source of musical inspiration in the customs and landscape of Egypt, where for nearly two years he gave music lessons, composed songs and piano pieces and explored the desert. This experience resulted in a series of successful descriptive works on exotic themes, from the novel ode-symphonies (Le désert, 1844; Christophe Colomb, 1847) to his masterpiece, Lalla-Roukh (1862), an opéra comique evoking Kashmir. Neither strictly oriental in inflection nor harmonically imaginative, much of his music won popularity for its tunefulness and its atmospheric orchestration (admired by Berlioz), and it influenced generations of later French composers, including Gounod, Saint-Saëns and Delibes.

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