Ernest Pingoud

Ernest Pingoud (; 14 October 1887 – 1 June 1942) was a Finnish composer and music critic born in Saint Petersburg. Life Pingoud was born to a father of French Huguenot ancestry and a German-Finnish mother. His father Guido Pingoud was the pastor of the German Lutheran parish of Saint Catherine in Saint Petersburg, and his mother belonged to the Finland-Swedish Sesemann family, related to the Melartin family. He also studied non-musical subjects, including geology, philosophy and literature, at Jena, Munich, Bonn and Berlin, with German literature as his main subject. He wrote a doctoral thesis on the young Goethe and Romanticism, but it was not approved because new sources that emerged at the same time undermined the material in the thesis. The programme included La dernière aventure de Pierrot, Piano Concerto No. 1 and Danse macabre, works influenced by Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin and Claude Debussy that were the most daring music yet performed in Finland. Style Pingoud’s preferred mode of musical expression was orchestral, especially in symphonic poems following the example of Scriabin Recordings A CD containing some of Pingoud’s symphonic poems has been recorded for Ondi