Louis Beydts

French composer, music critic and theatre director Louis Beydts is acclaimed for music that is "traditional, classical, clear, melodic and of indisputable elegance." His favourite composers were Fauré, followed by Debussy, Gounod, Messager, Ravel and Pierné. His conducting may be heard on the recording of Messager's Isoline and his own La Lyre et les Amours with Pierre Bernac, and A travers Paris.

Beydts composed A l’aimable Sabine and mélodies such as La lyre et les amours (cycle, 1938), Jeux Rustiques (Joachim du Bellay, 1936), Mélancolie, Quatre Odelettes, 1929 ; Quatre Humoresques, 1932; Quatre Chansons, 1935 (Chansons pour les oiseaux (Heyse): La colombe poignardée; Le petit pigeon blue; L'oiseau bleu; Le petit serin en cage); le Coeur inutile, as well as a suite for 14 instruments.

He composed incidental music for a Paris production of Numance by Cervantes, as several other plays at the Comédie-Française during and after the war, which led to further commissions for incidental music from other Paris theatres.

In April and May 1941 he acted as artistic director to the recording of Pelléas et Mélisande conducted by Roger Désormière. He finished his career as Director of the Opéra-Comique in Paris from 1952 to 1953, with the 50th anniversary production of Pelléas et Mélisande and the first French production of The Rake's Progress. An important figure in Parisian musical life, Beydts was a close friend of the cellist Pierre Fournier. He died at Caudéran in Gironde.