Émile Mathieu (composer)
Belgian composer (1844–1932)
Émile Louis Victor Mathieu (Lille, 18 October 1844 – Ghent, 20 August 1932) was a Belgian music teacher and composer of classical music.
Mathieu was born into a musical family: his father was the director of a theatre in Antwerp and a singer, while is mother taught singing at the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Leuven. He studied at the Conservatory of Brussels and later became a teacher of piano and harmony at the conservatory of Leuven. In 1867 Mathieu won a second prize in the Prix de Rome contest with his cantata Torquato Tasso’s dood. He won first place in the same contest in 1871 and again in 1873. Between 1873 and 1875 he lived in Paris, where he conducted the orchestra of the Théâtre du Châtelet. Afterwards, he returned to Brussels, where he held a position as accompanist at the Theatre Royal of LA Monnaie.
He headed the Leuven Conservatory (which today is called SLAC) from 1881, and succeeded Adolphe Samuel as director of the Ghent Conservatory from 1898 to 1924. He was also a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique.
His compositions include 7 operas, 3 symphonic poems, concertos for piano and violin, a Te Deum and choral works.
“Émile Mathieu (composer)” enters the record as belgian composer (1844–1932). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Émile, Mathieu and composer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2062068. VIAF identifies the subject as 27833089. The Library of Congress control number is no2006026613. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1844, 1932, 1867 and 1871.
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This entry incorporates text from “Émile Mathieu (composer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.