This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
The first thing you hear in Fernande Decruck’s music may surprise you: a saxophone, singing. In her 1943 “Sonata in C-Sharp Minor,” for example, the instrument moves through yearning melodies, angular turns and changing shades of sound. She believed the saxophone could be intimate and immense, as breathy as a human voice one moment and bright enough to cut through an orchestra the next.
Decruck was a composer of notable variety who could convincingly hop between styles, while synthesizing those elements into a cogent musical dialect.
“You always know that a piece is by her,” the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani said in a phone interview. “She has quite an individual voice.”
Esfahani contributed to a 2025 album of Decruck’s works in the concertante style — a genre for soloist and orchestra where the two forces are more integrated than in a concerto. It was the second such album recorded by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra of Michigan as part of a multivolume effort by the conductor Matthew Aubin to resurface her forgotten catalog.
The album opens with Decruck’s swirling cello concerto, of long, passionate, highly melodic solo lines; its initially bombastic accompaniment obscures an enduring sense of melancholy. It continues with “Les Trianons” for harpsichord and orchestra, which offers a combination of stateliness and wistfulness. In multiple movements, named after two buildings at the Palace of Versailles, Decruck enlivens the neo-Baroque stylings with unusual timbres — such as the celesta, a small twinkling keyboard instrument most associated with the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from “The Nutcracker.”
But it’s the saxophone that Decruck is most commonly associated with today. While the instrument had appeared in operas and orchestral scores before, it was treated as an accent. Decruck gave it a life of its own. And thanks partly to the saxophonist Marcel Mule, to whom she dedicated “Sonata in C-Sharp Minor,” the work became a staple of saxophone repertory, regularly appearing on concert programs and studied by players worldwide.
Decruck was born Jeanne Delphine Fernande Breilh on Dec. 25, 1896, in Gaillac, a town in southwestern France, to Ferdinand Breilh, a wine merchant, and Rosalie Borrel. After studying at the Toulouse Conservatory, she entered the Paris Conservatory, where she was a top student, winning prizes for harmony, counterpoint, fugues and piano accompaniment. While there, she also met her future husband, Maurice, a clarinettist, saxophonist and double bass player; they married in 1924.
She began composing that year, while working as a teaching assistant in Paris; her students included Olivier Messiaen, who would become one of the century’s most influential composers. She later became a music professor at Toulouse Conservatory.
At the same time, her son Alain Decruck said in a video interview, she was “always improvising on instruments,” particularly the piano and organ. (Despite often writing for the saxophone, she did not play it herself.) After studying improvisation with the composer and organist Marcel Dupré, she put that skill to dazzling use: At her 1929 American-debut recital, she improvised a symphony in the second half, building it on a theme proposed by local musicians.
By then she was living in the city, where her husband was working with the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra of Arturo Toscanini.
Decruck’s piano suite “Disques” was inspired by her experiences around New York: in traffic on the Queensboro Bridge, on the streets of Chinatown and on the Fifth Avenue bus. Conceived just a few years after Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” “Disques” captures the spirit of a Parisian in New York. The first movement, describing the bridge traffic, rattles along with what the score calls “a mechanical regularity,” becoming vibrant, intense and chaotic; “Mott Street at Night” is dark and spacious; “Drops of Water” is light and crisp, to reflect rain splashing into a puddle; and “Fifth-Avenue Bus” is full of jaunty, unpredictable rhythms.
Decruck was business savvy, according to Aubin, the conductor working to resurface her catalog. She recognized the potential of emerging musical landscapes — like the rising popularity of the saxophone — and also repurposed some of her ideas to reach new audiences. On the 2025 Jackson Symphony album, her “Sonata in C-Sharp Minor” appears in its repurposed form, for viola and orchestra.
Scattered through her compositional output are didactic pieces for amateurs, beginners and children, likely created as a way to make money.
Decruck and her husband eventually had three children. They lived comfortably between London Terrace in Manhattan, and a weekend house in Forest Hills, Queens, until Maurice sustained a hand injury that ended his performing career. He returned to Paris alone to start the music publishing company Les Editions de Paris. Decruck joined him a year later.
It wasn’t until 1942, when she was in her mid-40s, that Decruck decided to stop teaching and dedicate herself wholly to composition.
It was a complicated time under Nazi occupation: the music of Jewish composers such as Milhaud, Dukas and Schoenberg was forbidden under the Third Reich; Jewish educators at institutions like the Paris Conservatory were forced from their jobs; and one of Paris’s main orchestras, the Colonne, was temporarily renamed Pierné, because its founder — Édouard Colonne — was Jewish.
But under the Vichy government, subsidies for orchestras actually increased, and were concentrated in Paris. It was during this time that Decruck saw a turning point in her career.
“Here is a person who is taking advantage of her opportunities,” Aubin said in a video interview, adding, “but talk to any family member now, and they’re very clear that these were not Nazi sympathizers.”
In 1943, Decruck’s “Symphonie Rimbaldienne,” based on themes explored by the poet Arthur Rimbaud, premiered in Paris. In the newspaper Aujourd’hui, José Bruyr praised the work’s “seductive variety” and described a mood that was “dramatic and picturesque.”
“Such a promising start seems to foreshadow a brilliant musical career,” André Deleuze wrote in Aujourd’hui after hearing the same piece. “We will follow it with great interest.”
After that work premiered, “Cinq Poèmes Chrétiens,” “Hymne à Apollon” and her concerto for harp and orchestra were performed in the capital. In 1945, the literary journal Véronique called Decruck “the best female composer in France and, without doubt, the world.”
And yet, just six years later, by the end of 1951, Decruck had stopped composing altogether.
Her prominence had already begun to fade as French musical life changed after the war and exiled musicians returned. In 1947, she left Paris for Marblehead, Mass., where she had family, and where she experienced a short period of creativity. But her relationship with Maurice was effectively over. A year later, she returned to France and, in 1950, she divorced him.
Her options were further narrowed after they parted ways. He had been her publisher; it was now harder to distribute her music. Furthermore, Frenchwomen couldn’t open bank accounts without their husbands’ permission. She took a teaching job in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and wrote film music under pseudonyms to pay her bills. She died of a stroke on Aug. 6, 1954, at 57.
In her lifetime, Decruck’s didn’t have a champion like Imogen Holst, who promoted the music of her father, Gustav Holst, as well as that of the composer Benjamin Britten. Now Aubin is taking up that role for Decruck, giving her long-forgotten body of work a second life.
