Louis Deffès

Pierre Louis Deffès (25 July 1819 – 28 May 1900) was a 19th-century French composer. He excelled as a composer of both operas and large-scale sacred music. Life Deffès was born in Toulouse and admitted to the Paris Conservatory in 1839, where he studied with Fromental Halévy and Henri Montan Berton (composition), François Bazin (harmony), Auguste Barbereau (counterpoint and fugue), and Théodore Mozin (piano). In 1844, he composed La Toulousaine. The piece gained great popularity and became a signature tune of his home town. In 1847, he won second prize at the “Concours de Chants Historiques” with his composition Les Charmes de la Paix, and in the same year the Grand Prix de Rome with the cantata L’Ange et Tobie, based on a poem by Léon Halévy. During his stay in Rome, which was connected with the prize, he composed his Messe solennelle, which was first performed in 1850. In 1857, a performance followed at Notre Dame de Paris with 500 participants. In 1855, L’Anneau d’argent, the first of his twenty successful operas, was premiered at the Opéra-Comique. The Franco-Prussian War interrupted the succession of performances of his operas. Instead, he now wrote compositions such as the Ma