Henri Sauguet; Composer for Ballets, Theater, Films

PARIS — Composer Henri Sauguet, best known for his sophisticated but simple ballet scores, among them “Musique des Forains,” died at his home in Paris on Thursday after a long illness, his family said. He was 88.

Sauguet had been partly paralyzed for two years and had been suffering from heart problems, his son told the Associated Press.

Sauguet, who was born Henri Pierre Poupard in Bordeaux but took his mother’s maiden name, studied the piano and the organ as a child.

After World War I, he moved to Paris and met such other musicians as Charles Koechlin, Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie. They formed a group they called Ecole d’Arcueil from the area near Paris where Satie lived.

Sauguet’s first real success came in 1924 with the production at the Champs Elysees Theater of “Le Plumet du Colonel.”

He went on to compose such ballets as “La Chatte,” directed by Sergei Diagliev for the Ballets Russes and choreographed by George Balanchine in Monte Carlo in 1927, Ida Rubenstein’s “David” and Jean Giradoux’s “Ondine.”

In addition to his scores for at least 14 ballets, eight theatrical productions, symphonies, quartets, collections of songs and scores for about 35 films, Sauguet tried operatic scores.

The lengthy “La Chartreuse de Parme” was produced in 1939 at the Paris Opera. It received mixed reviews, and Sauguet went back to his first love--ballet.

“Les Forains,” which translates loosely as “Wanderers’ Music,” was written for France’s Roland Petit Company in 1945. Amid the euphoria at the end of World War II, it touched a popular chord, and Sauguet’s fame spread abroad.

In the postwar years he composed mainly comic opera and later wrote popular musical scores for children.

In 1976 he was elected a member of the French Institute, to the chair previously occupied by Milhaud at the Academie des Beaux-Arts.