JOLAS Betsy (1926)

A French composer born in 1926 in Paris.
Betsy Jolas studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory in 1946 where she was later appointed teacher of analysis (1975) then of composition (1978). She also taught in American universities, notably Yale, Harvard, Berkeley. She was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995) and received many awards both in France and abroad. An independent figure, she rejected any kind of rupture and laid claim to the inheritance of composers such as Monteverdi, Debussy, Schumann. The vocality that lies at the heart of all her music, as much vocal as instrumental, instils in her music a unique rhetorical and poetic expression. Her catalogue includes Quartet II (1964), D'un opéra de voyage (1967), Le pavillon au bord de la rivière (1975), Caprice à une voix (1975), Tales of a summer sea (1977), D'un opéra de poupée en sept musiques (1982), Le cyclope (1986), Frauenleben (1992), Schliemann (first staged at Lyons Opera in 1993), Lumor (1996), L'ascension du Mont Ventoux (2004).