Alfred Hector Roland and the Chanteurs Montagnards

Alfred Hector Roland (1797 – 1874) was a composer, a poet and the creator of the music conservatory of Bagnères-de-Bigorre (in the Hautes-Pyrénées ).

Roland also started the choir of the Chanteurs Montagnards (Singing Mountaineers). He is the author of many songs considered as classics of Pyrenean mountain singing.

In 1839, at the Champs-Élysées, they sang for 8000 listeners, including King Louis-Philippe. The group toured Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and in 1841 Germany, Prussia, Russia, Warsaw, Austria, Hungary, the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars. The 1st August 1842, they sang before the pope in the basilica of St. Mary of the Angels , the mountain Mass in Rome Alfred Roland.

From 1842 to 1844, the band resumed a new tour in France. In 1845, they are in Marseilles and embark for Egypt. In 1846, in Palestine, they sang at the Holy Sepulchre the Mass of Rome and the Royal Mass of Jerusalem. From there, they go to Athens, then to Constantinople where the Sultan received them.

Finally, this fabulous artistic expedition ends in France and London in 1855. The troupe's odyssey ends with a deficit of more than 100,000 francs, which is filled by the patrimony of Alfred Rolland and his copyrights on the property of the many literary and musical works he has produced. who have known more than two hundred editions.