Simon-Joseph Pellegrin

The abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin 
(1663 – 5 September 1745) was a French poet and playwright, a librettist who collaborated with Jean-Philippe Rameau and other composers.
Biography.
He was born at Marseille, the son of a "conseiller" to the Siège Présidial of the city. He was at first designated for an ecclesiastical career, from which he retained the courtesy title "abbé". Though he was for a time a novitiate of the Servites at Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, he soon embarked on a career as a ship's bursar. Returning to France in 1703, he settled in Paris and composed his earliest poems, among them an "Epître à Louis XIV", praising the Sun King's military successes, which gained the king's attention and the Académie française prize in 1704.
Probably thanks to Madame de Maintenon, Pellegrin succeeded in escaping the urging of his superiors that he become more fully integrated with his order; instead a papal dispensation enabled him to enter the Cluniac order, whereupon he was at the service of various schools, such as Saint-Cyr, for which he provided numerous pious "cantiques spirituelles", in which he translated psalms and canticles and set them to familiar tunes from the opera, at the same time that his services were retained for the theatres and the opera, which permitted an otherwise unknown poet Rémi the epigram:
Antoine de Léris esteemed him "an excellent grammarian and a most fecund author, to which he joined great goodness of heart and a grand simplicity of manner. Out of respect for his character as an abbé, he published most of his dramatic works under the name of his brother Jacques Pellegrin, styled the "Chevalier Pellegrin".
From 1705 onward he wrote four tragedies with Greek and Roman settings, "Polydore", "La Mort d'Ulisse", "Pelopée" and "Catilina", and six comedies, with modern aristocratic settings, "Le Pere intéressé, ou la Fausse inconstance", "Le Nouveau monde", "Le Divorce de l'Amour et de la Raison", "Le Pastor fido", "L'Inconstant" and "L'Ecole de l'hymen".
At least seven of his libretti were set to music and presented at the Opéra: "Télémaque" with music by André Cardinal Destouches (20 November 1714), "Renaud, ou la suite d'Armide" with music by Henri Desmarest, (5 March 1722), "Télégone" with music by a certain La Coste, "Orion" (in collaboration, music by La Coste), "La Princesse d'Elide", "Jephté" with music by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1732), and "Hippolyte et Aricie" with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1 October 1733), Rameau's first opera. The theatre anecdote would have the seasoned Pellegrin, who had demanded 500 "livres" for his poem, regardless of the work's success, tear up the promissory note on hearing the young Rameau's music, arguing that such a genius did not require such a stringent guarantee.
Pellegrin collaborated on at least one ballet-opera with the dramatist Marie-Anne Barbier, co-writing the libretto for "Les Plaisirs de la campagne" (1719)
Pellegrin died in Paris in 1745. 
Works.
In addition to some librettos for opera ("Antigone, Ariane, Loth, Orion"), Léris suggests also several other tragedies : "La Mort d'Ulysse, Pélopée, Catilina" ; six comédies : "Le Père intéressé ou la Fausse inconstance", "Le Nouveau monde", "Le Divorce de l'Amour & de la Raison", "Le Pastor fido", "L'Inconstant", "L'École de l'hymen".