Louis Lacombe

Pierre Louis Trouillon-Lacombe (26 November 1818 – 30 September 1884) was a French pianist and composer. Biography Lacombe was born in Bourges (Cher), the brother of composer Felicita Casella. He showed unusual musical abilities at very young age and was soon hailed as a child prodigy. He studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire from 1829 to 1832 with Pierre Zimmerman and won first prize in piano performance at age 12 in 1831. He began touring Western Europe after leaving the Conservatoire, and in 1834 studied composition in Vienna with Carl Czerny as well as theory with Ignaz von Seyfried and Simon Sechter. At the end of the decade, he settled in Paris and married his first wife; his second wife, Andrea Lacombe (née Favel), whom he married in 1869, was a singer. In Paris, Lacombe initially established himself as a virtuoso pianist, increasingly dedicating himself to composition and music criticism (his essays were partly reprinted in a posthumous collection, Philosophie et musique, 1896). Lacombe’s first published works include a piano quintet, a trio, and some piano pieces. He wrote a number of dramatic symphonies with soloist and choir, and his cantata, Sapho, was performed at t