Premiere Music Group, the Music Sales French affiliate, has acquired the catalogue of the French publisher Edition Choudens.
Editions Choudens was founded in 1845 by Antoine de Choudens and soon established its place as the principal publisher of French opera and operetta. In all, Choudens publishes 1,500 examples of these genres, including the greatest of 19th century French opera – Bizet’s Carmen, Gounod’s Faust, Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and key examples of the unique French operetta form, Messager’s Veronique, Varney’s Les Mousquetaires au convent and Louis Ganne’s Les Saltimbanques. And that publishing tradition has extended to the present day, with works by Marcel Landowski, Jean Prodromidès and Daniel-Lesur.
Latterly, the company published the scores to over 500 French films, from the earliest of talkies to the great classics of French cinema in the 1940s and 1950s – for instance, Les Visiteurs du Soir and La Ronde de L’Amour. And more recently still the company has developed a song catalogue which includes its most popular copyright of all - the classic standard song Sous le Ciel de Paris (‘Under Paris Skies’).
