Francine Benoît

Francine Benoît (18941990) was a musician, teacher, composer, conductor, and music critic. She played an active role in Portuguese feminist organizations and was an opponent of the Estado Novo dictatorship, which ruled between 1933 and 1974. Born in France, she lived most of her life in Portugal and became a naturalised Portuguese citizen in 1929. Early life Francine Germaine Van Gool Benoît was born in Périgueux in the Dordogne department of France on 30 July 1894, to a Belgian mother and a French father. Her father was an engineer and had already taken his family to Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain because of his work, when the family arrived in Portugal in 1906. They settled in Setúbal where her father had a job assembling machines for a fish-canning factory. She was first taught the piano by her mother, and also had private lessons, before studying the piano at the Academia de Amadores de Música in Lisbon. She later graduated with distinction in piano and harmony from the National Conservatory of Lisbon, where she was a student of Alexandre Rey Colaço. Benoît then returned to France to study composition with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum de Paris between 1917 and