Pierre-Octave Ferroud

Pierre-Octave Ferroud (6 January 1900 – 17 August 1936) was a French composer of classical music. He was born in Chasselay, Rhône, near Lyon. He went to Lyon, to Strasbourg (for military service from 1920-2) where he studied with Guy Ropartz, and again to Lyon where he was for a time an associate and "disciple" of Florent Schmitt, and a pupil of Georges Martin Witkowski. He then travelled to Paris in 1923, where he later founded with Henry Barraud, Jean Rivier and Emmanuel Bondeville Triton, a contemporary music society (in 1932).In a letter to Boris Asafiev, Sergei Prokofiev described his encounter with Ferroud, praised the Symphony in A and suggested that Asafiev might have a look at it. Ferroud's opera, he reported, impressed him much less.He wrote a biographical work about his mentor Florent Schmitt (whom he was, nevertheless, to pre-decease - Schmitt died 31 years after Autour de Florent Schmitt was published, in 1958.) Ferroud was a regular contributor of musical reviews and essays to the journal Paris-Soir. He died in 1936, when he was decapitated in a road accident in Debrecen, in Hungary. On hearing of Ferroud's death, Francis Poulenc wrote to Georges Auric of his distress.