Xavier Leroux 1863-1919

[Wheesht]

This French composer died 102 years ago today. In his 'Music Since 1900' (5th edition), Nicolas Slonimsky has this entry about him under 2 February 1919:

Xavier Leroux, French composer of melodramatic operas in a competent traditional style, pupil of Massenet, teacher of Alfredo Casella and other modern composers, dies in Paris at the age of 55.

According to his French Wikipedia entry, he won the 1st Prix de Rome in 1885 for the cantata Endymion. The English and German Wikipedia pages both state that Casella dedicated his Symphony No. 1 (1905) to him, the French site doesn't mention this.
Very little appears to have been recorded, but there is a CD of his opera Le Chemineau in a recording from 1956 on the Malibran label.

[eschiss1]

Casella:
the source for this odd claim isn't some obscure scholarly work unreferenced. It's the presence, on the full score (see IMSLP), of the words, handwritten,
"A mon cher maître et ami Xavier Leroux - Alfred Casella".

Hope that clears things up.

[Wheesht]

Thank you, that's very helpful. It's odd that this information is not on the French Wikipedia entry, which one would expect to be the most comprehensive about a French composer. (Nor is Le Chemineau called his masterpiece there – just goes to show how different Wikipedia entries in other languages can be). 

[Ebubu]

I don't know whether Le Chemineau is his masterpiece, as we don't know any other works of his.  But it's definitely his most famous one, and that has been performed on a few rare occasions in France in the 80's (Nantes and Bordeaux Operas, 1982) featuring Jean-Philippe Lafont in the title role.
And also in Marseille in Jan 1996.
The Nantes production which I saw didn't leave an imperishable memory on me.

[eschiss1]

10 operas of his are uploaded in some form to IMSLP, as are a dozen other works; if "we don't know any other works of his", well, there's somewhere to start. (His mazurka in f-sharp for piano, for example - score found in an anthology of French piano music edited by Isidor Philipp.)

[Ebubu]

By "we don't know", I meant, obviously, through recordings, official or not.
It seems that even the French Radio has recorded nothing except Le Chemineau.

[eschiss1]

And my link pointed to a private recording of sorts, if not necessarily what the kind you meant.

[eschiss1]

And, of course, you forgot to mention, multiple recordings of his song "Le nil" by tenor John McCormick and quite a few others (both on YouTube and in about 3 dozen compilations on Worldcat.)