Benoît Mernier was born in Belgium in 1964. He lives and works in Brussels.
He began playing the organ with Firmin Decerf, Jean Ferrard and Jean Boyer. A graduate of the Conservatoire Royal de Liège and the Conservatoire de Lille, he discovered contemporary music through contact with Claude Ledoux, Henri Pousseur, Bernard Foccroulle, Célestin Deliège and Philippe Boesmans, with whom he studied composition for several years.
He divides his time between teaching, organ concerts and composing.
After teaching organ, improvisation, musical analysis and composition at a number of Belgian art colleges, he is now professor of organ at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles and also teaches composition at the Queen Elisabeth Chapel as part of the ENOA European network of opera houses.
Benoît Mernier gives organ concerts in many European countries, as well as in Japan, Mexico and Canada. He has made several recordings, one of which won the "Grand Prix de l'Académie du disque Charles Cros". His repertoire ranges from early music (17th and 18th centuries) to Romantic and contemporary works.
Several of his works have won awards from the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), the International Rostrum of Composers sponsored by UNESCO, the Royal Academy of Belgium, the Communauté of Radios Publiques de Langue Française, etc.
The Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition commissioned him to write the compulsory work for the singing session in 2004. He has been composer-in-residence at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, at the Carinthischer Sommer festival in Austria, and guest of honour at the Festival de Wallonie in 2008.
His first opera, Frühlings Erwachen, was commissioned by the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and premiered there in 2007, directed by Vincent Boussard. It has since been revived in several opera houses, with a new production in 2015 directed by Guy Joosten.
Cyprès has released several discs of his work, including a CD/DVD box set of his first opera, which won a Diapason d'or (www.cypres-records.com). The recording of his Pange lingua for organ, performed by himself and published by the German label Aeolus, was also awarded a Diapason d'Or.
A book published by Mardaga has been devoted to that (‘L'Eveil du Printemps, naissance d'un opéra’).
La Dispute, an opera also commissioned by La Monnaie, premiered there in 2013 under the musical direction of Patrick Davin and staged by Karl-Ernst and Ursel Herrmann. The Koussevitzky Foundation and the US Library of Congress commissioned him to write a work for the centenary of the Pro Arte Quartet, which was premiered in the United States and recorded for the Albany label. Following a violin concerto written for Lorenzo Gatto, released on a Cyprès CD, he wrote a cycle on poems by Emily Dickinson for the Chœur des Jeunes and the Orchestre de la Monnaie, as well as an organ concerto premiered by Olivier Latry for the inauguration of the new organ at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Both of these works were released on disc, earning him the Octaves de la Musique 2019 award.
More recently, he completed the opera "On purge Bébé!" by Philippe Boesmans, following his death, and wrote the music for the film Ailleurs, si j'y suis by director François Pirot.
After a recent work commissioned by the OPRL, he is currently writing a new opera for the Opéra Royal de Wallonie (premiere in 2026), entitled Bartleby, based on the novel by Herman Melville and a libretto by Sylvain Fort.
Benoît Mernier is organist at Notre-Dame church "Le Sablon" and curator of the new organ at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique (Fine Arts class).
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)