Vincent d'Indy
His students included Albéric Magnard, Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Yvonne Rokseth, and Erik Satie, as well as Cole Porter.
At a time when nationalist feelings were high in both countries (circa the Franco-Prussian War of 1871), this brought Franck into conflict with other musicians who wished to separate French music from German influence.
He entered Franck's organ class at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1871 remaining there until 1875, when he joined the percussion section of the orchestra at the Châtelet Theatre to gain practical experience.
[3] Inspired by his studies with Franck and yet dissatisfied with the standard of teaching at the Conservatoire, d'Indy, together with Charles Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant, founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris in 1894.
[3] Of the teaching at the Schola Cantorum, The Oxford Companion to Music says, "A solid grounding in technique was encouraged, rather than originality", and comments that few graduates could stand comparison with the best Conservatoire students.
[n 1] Two atypical students were Cole Porter, who signed up for a two-year course at the Schola, but left after a few months,[7] and Erik Satie, who studied there for three years and later wrote, "Why on earth had I gone to d'Indy?
[10] In an attempt to further a proposed merger of the two organisations during the First World War d'Indy stepped down as president of the Société nationale to make way for the more "progressive" Gabriel Fauré, but the plan came to nothing.
[10] According to the biographer Robert Orledge, the death of d'Indy's first wife in 1905 removed the stabilising influence in the composer's life, and he became "increasingly vulnerable to politically motivated attacks on the Schola Cantorum and apprehensive of dangerously decadent trends in contemporary music in both France and Germany".
[3] During the First World War d'Indy served on cultural missions to allied countries, and completed his third music drama, La Légende de Saint-Christophe, in Orledge's view "a celebration of traditional Catholic regionalism as opposed to modern liberal democracy and capitalist values".
1920 he married the much younger Caroline Janson; Orledge writes that this "brought a true creative rebirth, witnessed in the serene Mediterranean-inspired compositions of his final decade".
Grove comments that his famed veneration for Beethoven and Franck "has unfortunately obscured the individual character of his own compositions, particularly his fine orchestral pieces descriptive of southern France".
[3] Among his best known pieces are the Symphony on a French Mountain Air for piano and orchestra (1886), and Istar (1896), a symphonic poem in the form of a set of variations in which the theme appears only at the end.
[1] Among d'Indy's other works are more orchestral pieces, including a Symphony in B♭, a vast symphonic poem, Jour d'été à la montagne, and another, Souvenirs, written on the death of his first wife.
[2][3] D'Indy helped revive a number of then largely forgotten Baroque works, for example making his own edition of Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea.
