Vincent d'Indy

Vincent d'Indy (1851-1931), French composer, teacher, and writer, born in Paris, and educated at the Paris Conservatoire. He was a pupil of the Belgian-French composer César Franck. D'Indy's reputation as a composer was established in 1886 with the performance of his so-called dramatic legend, The Song of the Bell (1879-1883). In 1890 he became president of the National Musical Society, which he had helped establish, and after 1900 he taught composition at the influential Schola Cantorum in Paris, of which he was a founder and director.

From Franck, d'Indy learned the principle of cyclic form, in which the same thematic material is used throughout all the movements of a composition (an idea originating in the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. D'Indy's work is in general more complex than that of Franck, a tendency counterbalanced in part by his fondness for nature and themes from French folk song. He wrote three symphonies, among them the Symphonie Cévenole (sur un Chant Montagnard Français) (Symphony on a French Mountain Air, 1886). Among his literary works are biographies of Ludwig van Beethoven (1906) and Franck (1911).