Puget is a well-known name in French musical history: the composer Louise Puget was famous for her salon romances in the 1840s; Puget was also the name of a famous family of French organ builders. This Puget was the son of the tenor Henri Puget and adopted his father’s stage surname. He studied at the Conservatoire with Marmontel and Massé, and won the Prix de Rome in 1873 for his cantata Mazeppa. Puget wrote a small number of successful works for the stage including a Shakespeare adaptation, Beaucoup de bruit pour rien, at the Opéra-Comique in 1899. His best songs date from the 1870s and Hugo, Musset and Gautier were his favoured poets. Puget wrote elegant ‘doubles’ for the following better-known songs in the French repertoire: La fuite (Duparc), La fleur et le papillon (Fauré, who inverted Hugo’s title, correctly used by Puget, for his first mélodie), Infidelité (Hahn), À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca (Massenet).

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2006
English: Richard Stokes