Henriette Puig-Roget was born in Bastia in 1910, her mother a sculptor and her father an army officer. A brilliant piano, organ, and composition student at the Paris Conservatory, she won a prize for composition in 1932 in the class of Henri Büsser. Her wish to also study conducting was rejected by director Henri Rabaud. In 1933, she won the Second Prix de Rome for composition. She became the organ-master for the Oratoire du Louvre and the Paris Synagogue, all the while pursuing a career as a concert pianist and organist. She was also conductor of voice at the Paris Opera from 1938 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1957, the year she succeeded Nadia Boulanger as professor of accompaniment at the Conservatory. In 1940 she married Catalan architect Ramon Puig Vinyals, with whom she had a daughter, Pauline. After her 1979 retirement, she became a concert performer and professor of music in Japan until 1991. Despite being very discreet about her composing, she leaves behind an oeuvre of over two hundred and fifty works (most of them composed between 1926 and 1956), of which only about forty have been published: a hundred-odd mélodies and chansons, twenty or so choir pieces, a dozen piano pieces, about thirty for organ, fifteen chamber music pieces, a dozen symphonic pieces (notably concertante), pedagogical pieces, and some radio music. Loïc Mallié spoke thusly about Puig-Roget’s Triathlon (1977) for organ: “These three short pieces are a true masterwork of vibrant intensity: colourful, vivacious, with a sliver of nostalgia in the Andante. All of her virtuosic and poetic talent is assembled here, in a sort of inspired synthesis.” In 1991, she spoke about the difficulties faced by women composers specifically: “I have never had to complain about my male colleagues, but rather about a mindset in the wider public, which considers ‘women’s works’ with some condescension.”

– Florence Launay, based on Pauline Puig and Françoise Mautalent –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]