Elsa Barraine
French composer · France · On the map · Musicians · Lived 1910 to 1999 · aged 89
Elsa Jacqueline Barraine was a composer of French music in the time after the neoclassicist movement of Les Six, Ravel, and Stravinsky. Despite being considered “one of the outstanding French composers of the mid-20th century,” Barraine's music is seldom performed today.
Elsa Barraine is read about 45 times a day, in 11 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 17 June 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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Barraine (1940)
Paul Dukas and his composition students at the Paris Conservatoire, 1929. From left to right, around the piano: Pierre Maillard-Verger, Elsa Barraine, Yvonne Desportes, Tony Aubin, Pierre Revel, Georges Favre, Paul Dukas, René Duclos, Georges Hugon, Maurice Duruflé. Seated on the right: Claude Arrieu, Olivier Messiaen.Awards
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She won the Prix de Rome in 1929 for La vierge guerrière, a sacred trilogy named for Joan of Arc, and was the fourth woman ever to receive that prestigious award. Barraine's Symphony No. 2 "Voïna", composed in 1938, was a huge success when it received its world premiere performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Manuel Rosenthal at Covent Garden on July 7, 1946 during the opening concert of the 1946 ISCM Festival in London. The headline of Philip Whitacre’s review of the concert for London's Evening Standard the next day - in which he described the work as “concise, original, and alive” - was “We shall hear more of Mlle. Barraine” and the symphony was hailed by Alan Frank in The Musical Times as "expert" and as "France's best contribution" to the festival. Along with Barraine's earlier Symphony No. 1 (1931), it has been commercially recorded twice recently.
