Thérèse Brenet

Thérèse Brenet was born in Paris on 22 October 1935. As a child she studied the piano, including with Marguerite Long, and took a premier prix de piano at the Conservatoire de Reims before entering the Conservatoire de Paris in 1954.

At the Paris Conservatoire she studied harmony with Maurice Duruflé, counterpoint and fugue with Noël Gallon, and composition with Darius Milhaud and Jean Rivier. English sources also name Henri Dutilleux among her teachers. She took premiers prix in harmony, counterpoint and fugue, and in 1965 premiers prix in composition and orchestration.

In 1963 she received a deuxième second Prix de Rome for the cantata Les Hommes sur la terre. In 1965 she won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome for Les Visions prophétiques de Cassandre, a setting drawn from Aeschylus. The award brought a residency at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Médicis) from 1966 to 1969. She also undertook study travel in Poland, where her teachers included Witold Lutosławski.

Brenet's early public success included the oratorio Clamavit (1965) for narrator, soprano, chorus and orchestra, commissioned by French radio with Michel Bouquet among its interpreters. It was selected to represent the French section at UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers and was widely broadcast abroad. Sidérales (1970), for orchestra with optional narrator and a text adapted from Lucretius, ends with a theme marked perdendosi, suggesting music continuing beyond the written close.

From about 1970 she taught at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. In 1971 she succeeded Pierre Lantier as professor of solfège, a post she held until 2000. She sat on juries for writing, composition and electroacoustics. After retirement she devoted herself more fully to composition.

Her catalogue of roughly eighty works includes piano pieces (Océanides, Au vent d'ouest, Never More), chamber music often featuring Celtic harp, mandolin, saxophone or ondes Martenot, concertos and symphonic poems, and vocal scores. Notable later titles include Chimères for mandolin and string orchestra (1993), 5523 Luminet PH 8 for wind orchestra (1999, named after an asteroid), and the symphonic poem Le Livre de l'Harmonie du Monde (2010). She received the Prix Stéphane Chapelier-Clergue-Gabriel Marie of SACEM (1971) and the Médaille d'Argent de la Ville de Paris (1973), among other distinctions, and was an honorary member of the National Academy of History in Reims.

Brenet lived in Paris. According to contemporary reports after her death, she shared the family home in the 16th arrondissement with her unmarried sister Antoinette, a professor of Classics.

She kept close ties to performers and colleagues who championed her music, including Celtic harpist Denise Mégevand and, in later years, collaborators such as Jean-Thierry Boisseau. Private details beyond what she and reputable obituaries made public are not widely recorded.

Thérèse Brenet died in Paris during the night of 5 to 6 September 2026, aged 90. French sources, including Musica et Memoria and the French Wikipedia article citing an avis de décès in Le Figaro, give 6 September; several English obituaries give 5 September. No public cause of death has been reported.

Classical Music Daily, Slipped Disc and other music press noted her Prix de Rome, her decades at the Paris Conservatoire, and a body of work of about eighty scores spanning tonal and atonal practice.

Brenet belongs to the generation of French composers who trained under Milhaud, Rivier and Dutilleux, won the Prix de Rome in the mid-1960s, and then taught a later generation at the Conservatoire while keeping an independent compositional voice. Her openness to Celtic harp, saxophone ensembles, ondes Martenot and astronomical or literary programmes left a distinctive catalogue on disc and in publishers' lists.

Pupils and associates including Luc Héry, Dominique Probst and Paul Wehage carried aspects of her teaching into performance and composition. Recordings on labels such as Pavane, Frémeaux & Associés and Delatour keep works including Chimères, Odi et amo and Au vent d'ouest in circulation. She is remembered as both a Prix de Rome laureate and a long-serving Conservatoire pedagogue who never stopped writing.