Henri Rabaud

[1][2] After schooling at the Lycée Condorcet,[3] Rabaud entered the Conservatoire in 1893, studying with Antonin Taudon (harmony) and André Gedalge and Jules Massenet (composition).

[1] In 1899, when he was twenty-six, he came to wider public attention with his tone poem La Procession nocturne, depicting a well-known episode from Lenau's Faust, a composition that combined the fantastical and the religious.

[5] Rabaud's mystical oratorio Job (1900) enjoyed considerable success, and among his operas Mârouf, savetier du Caire ("Marouf, the Cobbler of Cairo") (1914), based on the Thousand and One Nights, was particularly popular.

[1] Mârouf was staged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1917, and at the suggestion of its conductor there, Pierre Monteux, Rabaud wrote a new aria for the star soprano, but the work met with limited success and was dropped from the company's repertoire after a couple of seasons.

Fauré, on being appointed in 1905, had radically changed the administration and curriculum, introducing compositions by the most modern composers, taboo under his predecessors.

[15] After the outbreak of the Second World War and the German invasion of France, Rabaud sought to protect Jewish members of the faculty, including Lazare Lévy and André Bloch,[16] but fearful that the Nazis would close the Conservatoire if he did not comply, he collaborated with the occupying authorities to the extent of supplying details of staff, and later of students, who were Jews or of Jewish family.

[17] Among the faculty members dismissed by the Vichy government on racial grounds was Bloch, whom Messaien succeeded as professor of harmony.