Désiré Beaulieu

Marie-Désiré Martin-Beaulieu (11 April 1791 – 21 December 1863) was a French composer and concert organizer. Life Born in Paris, Beaulieu was the son of an artillery officer and descendant of a rich cloth merchant family based in Niort. He adopted the name Beaulieu after the Beaulieu estate bought by his grandfather in 1761. Beaulieu had violin lessons with a musician named Alliaume, a student of Isidore Bertheaume (about 1751–1802) and from 1803 with Rodolphe Kreutzer. Since 1805 he had composition lessons with Angelo Maria Benincori (1779–1821), later with Abbé Nicolas Roze. From 1809 he attended the class of Étienne-Nicolas Méhul at the Conservatoire de Paris. In 1811, he won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome with the cantata Héro et Léandre after a libretto by Jacques Bins de Saint-Victor. However, he renounced his stay in Rome and settled with his wife Francoise Caroline Rouget de Gourcez in Niort, where her father had been mayor until the French Revolution. Nevertheless, he fulfilled his obligations as a winner of the Prix de Rome and sent several church music pieces to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. After the death of his teacher Méhul, he composed a Requiem in 1819, which was al