Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray

His bucolic upbringing near the family estate of Grézillières certainly added to his eventual fascination with the folklore, music, and culture of Brittany and other nations.

[1] Another of his uncles, Jules Rieffel, from Alsace, founded one of France's first agricultural schools called the École nationale supérieure agronomique de Rennes.

He served in the Franco-Prussian War and was wounded during the siege of Paris, receiving the Medaille militaire for conspicuous bravery.

Through music-making and time spent at the Villa Medici in Rome, he became good friends with Jules Massenet.

Early in April (1864), Bourgault left to join his family in Naples, expecting to return to Rome only for the three summer months to write his envoi".

On 27 November 1864, Irvine says that Bourgault held a splendid garden party at the Villa Medici that was attended by 20 men and women from the Trastevere, the old Jewish quarter of Rome across the river from Campo dei Fiori.

The party roamed all over the grounds of the Villa Medici ending up "in a brilliantly lighted sculptor's Falguière's studio, where six musicians with mandolins and guitars provided music for the costumed dancers."

Anachronistic for the time, he composed a two-part work in 1882 called Rapsodie cambodgienne with genuine gamelan instruments and Cambodian musical themes.

The eventual performance of this piece in 1889 was spurred on by Bourgault and Debussy's attending of the World's Fair in Paris during the latter half of 1889.

He wrote many other operas, choral works and orchestral music and published several collections of folksongs, mainly Greek, Breton, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish.

He said: No element of expression existing in a tune of any kind, however ancient, however remote in origin, must be banished from our musical idiom.