Jean Jules Aimable Roger-Ducasse was born at Bordeaux on 18 April 1873. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Émile Pessard and André Gedalge, and became the star pupil and close friend of Gabriel Fauré, a connection that ran through the rest of his working life.

He succeeded Fauré as professor of composition at the Conservatoire, and in 1935 inherited Paul Dukas’s composition class. His pupils included Jehan Alain, Claude Arrieu, Sirvart Kalpakyan Karamanuk, Jean-Louis Martinet and Francis George Scott. Like Dukas and Duruflé, he was severely self-critical, and destroyed music that did not satisfy his own standards. He also orchestrated works by Debussy and by Fauré. He died at Le Taillan-Médoc, in the Gironde, on 19 July 1954, aged eighty-one.

Roger-Ducasse’s music sits in a direct French orchestral line, which he understood as running unbroken from Berlioz through Saint-Saëns, and it is his handling of the orchestra that his standing rests on. The symphonic works are the substance of the catalogue: Au Jardin de Marguerite of 1901 to 1905, after Goethe’s Faust; the Sarabande of 1907, a symphonic poem with chorus; the Suite française of the same year; the Marche française of 1914; the paired Nocturne de printemps of 1920 and Nocturne d’hiver of 1921; the Epithalame of 1923; and Ulysse et les sirènes of 1937.

For the stage he wrote the lyric mimodrama Orphée, composed in 1912 and 1913 and staged in June 1926, and the comédie lyrique Cantegril, given at the Opéra-Comique on 6 February 1931. He left a piano quartet, two string quartets, the second of which was first heard on 24 May 1953, a Romance for cello and piano, and piano pieces including études, barcarolles and arabesques. The organ Pastorale of 1909, a virtuoso showpiece, has proved his most durable single work and has kept a particular hold among organists in the United States. His broader influence came through teaching: holding the Conservatoire’s composition chair and then its orchestration chair, in succession to Fauré and to Dukas, put him at the centre of French compositional training between the wars.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Roger-Ducasse
https://www.musimem.com/roger-ducasse.htm