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Désiré Pâque was born in Liège on 21 May 1867 and died in Bessancourt, north of Paris, on 20 November 1939. He received a thorough training in organ and composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Music at Liège. He was one of several brilliant and hard-working students (Armand Marsick, Louis Lavoye, Charles Smulders, Léon and Joseph Jongen, principally) under an inspiring principal, Jean-Théodore Radoux. Désiré Pâque was adventurous and evidently somewhat headstrong. He choose to venture abroad to seek fame, but thisattempt to found a conservatoire in Sofia in 1897 was not successful. He then taught composition in Athens from 1900 to 1902, returning to Brussels in 1902, he went to Paris in 1905, then to Lisbon in 1906, where he remained until 1909. He was there remembered for a long time for having taught Luis Freitas Branco (Lisbon, 1890 - 1955). He left Portugal for good and moved to Germany in june 1909 (Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin) before he took root in Switzerland in 1913. When World War I broke out, the composer and his family settled in Paris in the month of May 1914. Désiré Pâque tries unsuccessfully to make his mark. From 1927 to 1939, he maintains a significant creative activity (almost a fourth of his work appears during this last period), but success eluded him. He became inward-looking in the course of his increasingly harsh and morose retreat in Bessancourt, in the Valley of the river Oise.
Early in his carrer, in 1909, his friend Busoni made him aware of the aesthetic problems posed by the emergence of Schoenbergian atonality, and he was quick to seek to define a creative strategy in a period which had thrown up so many profound questions. He fashioned his own personal mode of expression, defending it without becoming dogmatic : he called it "adjonction constante d'éléments musicaux nouveaux" which might be translated "continuous musical sequence". This composition technique made its first appearance in his op. 67, the Organ Symphony, composed in Berlin in 1910, immediatly before his first Piano Sonata.
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