Lucie Barbier (Q67846)

French singer and pianist Lucie Barbier (née Hirsch) was the secretary of 'La Société des Concerts Franҫais' which was set up to promote French music in Britain and which flourished from 1907 to 1916. She founded the University College of Wales Musical Club in Aberystwyth in 1909 and became an enthusiast of Welsh folk-songs, training the Welsh Vocal Quartet which toured France in 1911 and 1913. Barbier corresponded with both French and British composers and musicians, amongst them Debussy and Saint-Saëns, Ethel Smyth and Arthur Somervell. Her husband, André Barbier, was a French lecturer. She died in 1963. Her grand-daughter, the historian Martha Stonequist (b. 1946), undertook a Ph.D. study of Barbier.