Robert Oboussier was a Swiss composer and music critic. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on 9 July 1900, and died in Zurich on 9 June 1957. He concealed his homosexuality because of prevailing standards of public morality. He was killed after a brief sexual encounter with an inmate who had escaped from a juvenile prison in Zurich.
Oboussier first studied in Heidelberg and Mannheim. In 1920–1921 he attended the Zurich Conservatory, where he studied with Volkmar Andreae and K. Vogler. He later studied composition with F. Jarnach in Berlin and conducting with Z. Ochs at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.
From 1922 to 1930 he lived and composed in Florence, Munich, and Paris, then lived in Berlin from 1930 to 1938. He worked as a music critic for specialist journals and daily newspapers, including Musical Review, The Minstrel, Weekly Review, Munich Latest News, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. From 1930 to 1933 he lectured on music at Lessing University in Berlin; from 1933 to 1938 he served as a music lecturer for the German General Newspaper. He made his first appearance before a wide audience as a composer at the Donaueschingen Festival of Chamber Music in 1923.
Oboussier settled in Zurich in 1939. From 1942 he directed the Central Archive of Swiss Music, becoming its deputy director in 1948, and in 1954 joined the board of the Swiss Music Association. His best-known works include songs and choruses setting poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, C. F. Hebbel, Clemens Brentano, Matthias Claudius, Anna de Noailles, and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as arrangements of old English songs for a cappella performance. His works also include the opera Amphitryon, based on Molière and presented in Berlin in 1951, orchestral, chamber, and vocal music, and Antigone for voice (alto) and orchestra (1939).
He wrote The Symphonies of Beethoven, first published in Berlin in 1937 and issued in a third edition in 1961, and Berlin Musical Chronicle 1930–1938, published in Zurich in 1969.