Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny ((1729-10-17)17 October 1729 – (1817-01-14)14 January 1817) was a French composer and a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts (1813). He is considered alongside André Grétry and François-André Danican Philidor to have been the founder of a new musical genre, the opéra comique, laying a path for other French composers such as François-Adrien Boieldieu, Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet in this genre. Paul Dukas is quoted as saying, "Of all the composers of our country, he may be the first who had the gift of true, human emotion, of communicative expression and of fair feeling".