Cécile Chaminade

The Parisian composer and pianist Cécile Chaminade contributed more than any other creative musician to the colour of cultural life in the city on the Seine both in the versatility of her means of expression and [in terms of formal diversity] among the composers of the French piano music of the Belle Epoque, comparable most closely to Saint-Saëns and Debussy. She mastered the classical-romantic sonata form with the same confidence as the theory of the lied or the tonal balance of short character pieces and dances. With more than 200 piano pieces and some 130 songs with piano accompaniment, she composed an oeuvre between around 1880 and 1915 in these two fields alone that ranks as one of the most extensive of the period. What is more important than the quantity of her life’s work as a composer, including not only the comic opera “La Sévillane” and the ballet “Callirho딝 but also one concertante piece for piano and orchestra, two piano trios, one concertino for flute and orchestra and a mass, is the quality of her melodic inventiveness. Cécile Chaminade was, as even inconspicuous little pieces in her “Album des Enfants” op. l26 [or chanson-like songs] demonstrate, a bor¬n melodist full of lyrical refinement with a highly developed sense of measure and clarity. Like Mélanie Bonis and Lili Boulanger, the winner of the Rome Prize who died at an early age, she continued the old tradition of typically French transparency [and singability as a whole]. Although she was at times a figure of fun [or even notoriety] as a salon composer, it is no longer possible to imagine Pari¬sian musical life at the turn of the century without Cécile Chaminade. In particular, it is her music for solo piano, with its expression of noblesse and elegance, which has come to epitomise the music of the Belle Epoque and to which she owed her social advancement and long-lasting popularity as a performer mainly of her own works.
Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade was born on 8 August 1857 at the foot of the hill of Montmartre in Paris. She was the third of four children, descended on her father’s side from a line of offi¬cers and seamen. Her artistically gifted mother was considered a good pianist and a [highly thought-of] singer. It was she who taught the rudiments of music to her daughter, who made her first attempts at composition before she was even ten. When her father, who at that time was the director of an insurance company, bought a property in Le Vésinet in 1863, the young Cécile made the acquaintance there of Georges Bizet. Convinced of the girl’s above-average musi¬cal abilities, he lovingly called her “mon petit Mozart”.
Cécile was taught privately by teachers from the Paris Conservatory, which she was not permitted to attend. She received piano lessons from Félix Le Couppey, and was given violin lessons by Joseph Marsick. She continued her piano training with Antoine Marmontel and studied composition under Benjamin Godard who familiarized her with the classicist currents in French music of the late romantic period.
Félix Chaminade’s breakthrough as a composer came in 1888 with her greatest works. On 16 March her ballet ”Callirho딝 had such a successful opening night at the Grand Théatre de Marseille that there were more than 200 subsequent performances in the same theatre [and individual pieces taken from the colourful score, such as the ”Pas des Amphores” and the ”Pas des Echarpes”, were soon being printed by American publishers.] On 18 April the ”concertante piece” op.40 for piano and or¬chestra with its brilliantly evocative Spanish elements and her “symphonie dramatique” “Les Amazones” for choirs and large orchestra had an eventful première in Antwerp. Now celebrated as a composer, too, Cécile Chaminade shared with Emmanuel Chabrier and Moritz Moszkowski the Paris publisher Enoch who printed most of her works over a period of several decades and encouraged her to write four-handed arrangements of numerous solo pieces to further the wider distribution of her works.
Having already given concerts in Western Switzerland and in Holland, from 1892 onwards Chaminade took particular pleasure in performing in England, where on repeated occasions she was a guest of Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle [for subsequent recreation]. Meanwhile in the USA actual Chaminade Clubs had been established and were insisting upon making the personal acquaintance of the composer of such popular piano pieces as Sérénade op.29 or the lst Arabesque op.6l. In the 1907/08 concert season, Chaminade gave guest recitals of her own compositions in American cities from Boston to St. Louis and in Canada, making 25 appearances and filling concert halls wherever she went. Her husband Louis Matthieu Carbonel, a music publisher from Marseille, had died in 1907. She had married him in Le Vésinet in 1901, but had maintained a certain distance by keeping her residence near Paris. She explained her platonic marriage with the words: ”Quelle désillusion que les mariages d‘artistes, l‘un mange toujours l‘autre” (What a disappointment these artists‘ marriages are – one partner always devours the other). After the loss of her mother in 1911 her first creative crisis began to emerge, continuing after the outbreak of the First World War. Cécile Chaminade stopped composing temporarily, and then, after she had withdrawn from social and cultural life in 1922, her creative outpouring came to an end. By the time of her death on 13 April 1944 in Monte Carlo [where she had retired to in 1936,] she was known to the international music world only for her concertino for flute op.l07. She had written this piece in 1902 at the height of her fame as a compulsory exercise for the Paris Conservatory which had once been closed to her. Cécile Chaminade not only made history in 1913 by becoming the first woman composer to be admitted to the French Legion of Honour, but was also the first European composer to have the honour of being published in America. As early as 1893 the famous New York publisher G. Schirmer issued two anthologies of her songs, followed by two piano albums six years later. The exotic tone colour of dance-inspired bravura pieces such as ”Lolita” and ”Lolita” and ”La Morena”, reminiscent of their fellow countryman Louis Moreau Gottschalk, particularly appealed to the Americans.
The selection of works printed here endeavours to present a wide variety in terms of form and content, taking into account, as it does, not only the sonata but also such different expressions of Cécile Chaminade’s Parisian spirit as the brilliant concert étude with its Romantic character and the salonesque, playful waltz, the Song without Words of the type introduced by Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the early impressionist, atmospheric ”Poème provençal”, a piece of landscape poetry for piano of an austere and slightly melancholy nature. In all of these samples of this extravagantly wide-ranging body of works for piano [by a musician constantly alternating between the salon and the concert hall] one is aware of a manner of composition that is attuned to the instrument in every detail and feeds on the composer’s own experience, and although it does not lack profundity, it subordinates such qualities to a light-footed, [at times superficially] humorous elegance which became her trademark at an early stage with the minuet op.5 and other dances [from her early works].
The Etude pathétique op.l24 with its great dynamic diversity, ranging from piano to triple forte, combines energetic playing style with enchantingly delicate lyrical passages to be performed dolcissimo. In its highly cantabile middle voice, the concert étude Automne op..35 No.2 uses one of the formal devices introduced by the Romantic piano virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg, while the agitated middle section, with its [toccata-like] rotating chords, points ahead to the ”Soirée dans Grenade” from Debussy’s ”Estampes” composed in 1903. This model of harmony [par excellence] written in the warm tones of D flat major is closer to the expressive range of Rachmaninov than to the classicism, dominated at that time by Saint-Saëns, which suggests itself in the Mendelssohn-like scherzo sections of the étude Fileuse op.35 No.3. Dedicated to Ossip Gabrilovich, the St.Petersburg-born pianist and conductor, Etude romantigue op.l32 was first published in 1909 and follows Valse Caprice op.33, a waltz liberally interspersed with chromatics and pleasing in its playful spirit. In the fanfare-like introduction the composer quotes a motif from Chopin’s Polonaise op.53 and goes on to remind us again of the master of the concert waltz with an elegantly swaying waltz theme.
Together with the Six Etudes de Concert op.35 (1886), the Sonata in C minor op.2l, dedicated to her brother-in-law Moritz Moszkowski, is not only one of Cécile Chaminade’s main works but is also one of the most important French works in this genre in the second half of the 19th century. Undoubtedly composed at an earlier date but first published in 1895, this sonata draws on classical, romantic and baroque models, unifying stylistic elements from Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin with those of J. S. Bach to create a whole that nevertheless ultimately shows the very characteristic hand of Cécile Chaminade in the abundance of its splendidly cantabile passages. The expressive fugato in the main theme, with its dramatic surges and passionate outbursts, underlines the composer’s mastery of counterpoint to the same extent as the lyrical middle section of the slow movement shows her melodic inventiveness. She included the finale, which she had composed as a kind of perpetuum mobile with toccata-like features, unchanged and entitled Appassionato as No.4 in the Six Etudes de Concert op.35 after the sonata had ceased to be reprinted.
Walter Labhart
Translation: Holger Klier
see also CD siehe CD SAL 7013