Léo Ferré (French: [leo feʁe]; 24 August 1916 – 14 July 1993) was a Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer.

Some of his songs have become classics of the French chanson repertoire, including "Avec le temps", "C'est extra", "Jolie Môme" and "Paris-Canaille".

At age seven, he joined the choir of the Monaco Cathedral and discovered polyphony through singing pieces by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria.

Ferré listened to such musicians as bass singer Feodor Chaliapin, discovered Beethoven under the baton of Arturo Toscanini (Coriolanus), and was deeply moved by the Fifth Symphony.

In Musique Byzantine (1953–54), he expanded his topics on aesthetics, such as tonality necessity, exotic melody, opera (the "song of rich people"), boredom, and originality or "marshmallow music".

[3] In 1956, Ferré wrote and composed La Nuit (The Night), a ballet with sung sections commissioned by choreographer Roland Petit, but which failed to find an audience.

This artistic output, including the way Ferré would write for symphonic orchestras after 1970, would have an influence in the English-speaking world over such singer-songwriters as Scott Walker,[6] Martin Newell[7] and Benjamin Clementine.

The huge success of "C'est extra", an erotic ballad, greatly expanded his audience, especially among the French youth, who recognized in the poet the "prophet" of his own rebellion.

With very precise work on the voice (rhythm, speech) and rhetorical writing derived from the prose of poet Arthur Rimbaud, Ferré ritualized his speaking in an incantatory and dramatic fashion.

[13] CBS soon dropped Ferré, whose commercial potential was estimated too low (his new aesthetics of symphonic down-tempo being against the current of all musical trends, it was complicated to put the artist on the radio and reduced the possibility of a hit).