The yr is 1794. The Reign of Terror is in full swing in Revolutionary France, with hundreds being executed on the guillotine. The most recent imprisoned aristocrat, Hélène de Montgeroult, seems earlier than the Committee of Public Security who will determine her destiny.
Hélène de Montgeroult isn’t alone. In addition to the police guard, this 30-year-old girl is accompanied by an merchandise extra usually present in a Parisian salon than a courtroom – a piano. She is reputed to be one of many nation’s most interesting musicians, and if she’s good, because the delegation of musicians advocating for her have promised, then she could possibly be of use, first for ‘patriotic occasions’, later on the capital’s new conservatoire. She is invited to take her seat on the keyboard, to play for her very life.
Nearly inevitably, she is requested to carry out La Marseillaise, a 1792 rallying cry that may quickly turn into the nationwide anthem of the brand new French republic. What the pianist does with it’s surprising: after taking part in the tune, she begins to improvise variations on it, the music regularly constructing to an important climax, the melody billowing out over arpeggios. The boys listening are moved to tears. She walks free.
Who was Hélène de Montgeroult?
Although unimaginable, this story seems to be way more fact than fantasy. But the lady who pulled off this miraculous save has been all however forgotten. Her identify was Hélène de Montgeroult, born Hélène de Nervo right into a noble household in Lyon, 1764. A prodigy pianist taught by the best in Paris, she did certainly go on to work on the Paris Conservatoire, changing into its first feminine professor of music in 1795.
She additionally, remarkably, each composed at a time when it was hardly ever acceptable for a girl to take action and likewise had her work printed. By her loss of life, in Florence in 1836, she had written 9 piano sonatas and, between 1788 and 1812, her magnum opus: 114 Etudes, which appeared within the hefty Cours complet pour l’enseignement du forte-piano of 1816 alongside a choice of fantasies, nocturnes for voice and piano and different quick items. But her legacy has remained side-lined – till now.
‘I don’t know the way usually nice historic composers are found, however that is actually thrilling,’ says pianist Clare Hammond, who has recorded 31 of Montgeroult’s Etudes for BIS (out this November). ‘Nice composers have a novel voice. They use comparable strategies to different composers however there’s one thing they do this makes it particular. She has that.’
Hammond first heard about Montgeroult in 2019, due to French musicologist Jérôme Dorival. Since then, she has performed a number of of the etudes as encores, main the way in which in bringing Montgeroult to the UK. Dorival’s work underpins virtually every part we now know in regards to the French musician: his is the one biography (in French), he has been typesetting her scores and it was due to his scholarship that in 2006 her music was heard once more.
Extra like this
Prior to now few years, a handful of French and Francophone pianists have recorded discs of her music. In the summertime of 2022, she featured as a BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week. Lastly, Montgeroult could also be receiving her due.
Montgeroult breaks down our conceptions of the boundaries between the Classical and Romantic eras – Dorival describes her because the ‘lacking hyperlink between Mozart and Chopin’.
‘The music is so prescient,’ says Hammond; ‘there’s a Classical sensibility within the lightness of contact you want, which I feel is broadly because of her writing for fortepiano. It took me a very long time to seek out the best voice for her music as a result of it appears, from the type, to be of a later period.’ Montgeroult’s harmonic language is extra superior, for starters, whereas her love of the singing tone on the piano, an concept popularised by Chopin’s bel canto melodies, can also be forward of its time.
The Etudes showcase Montgeroult’s originality and flexibility. The primary 20 or so are virtually akin to prolonged workout routines, however then, notes Hammond, slightly like Czerny’s College of Velocity they begin to blossom: ‘There’s such stylistic selection.’ Every fulfils a sensible operate – to make fingers supple (No. 34), for example, or to steadiness melody and accompaniment (No. 38) – but turns into a chunk of poetry, slightly like Chopin achieved together with his later Etudes. ‘For me, No. 111 in G minor encapsulates her type of Romanticism,’ says Hammond. ‘It’s not melodramatic – it has a extra enlightenment sensibility in Romantic garments, with a extra ahead and trendy harmonic language. No. 62 in E flat main is gorgeous, flowing, calming with very refined harmonic twists, whereas No. 38 in A minor is without doubt one of the easiest ones I’ve recorded. It’s very stunning and heart-rending.’
Someway, this forgotten composer anticipated developments of the Romantic period. ‘Chopin’s C minor Etude sounds much less “Revolutionary” after you’ve heard Montgeroult’s swirling Etude No. 107, which anticipates it by 20-odd years,’ wrote Erica Jeal in The Guardian.
Proof that the early Romantics knew her work is tough to return by, but pianist Edna Stern famous in an interview about her Montgeroult recording that ‘from a musical standpoint, it appears evident that Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann have been very effectively acquainted along with her work’. It’s clear that Montgeroult knew the pianist Marie Bigot, who taught Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, and it’s thought that Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann’s father, could have identified Montgeroult’s technique.
When it got here to the Romantic Bach revival, spearheaded by Felix Mendelssohn, once more Montgeroult was a step forward. She obtained maintain of copies of Bach scores – her curiosity most likely piqued by certainly one of her academics, Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel, himself regarded as taught by CPE Bach – and a Bachian affect threads all through her music, in canons, fugues and polyphony. Montgeroult herself cites JS Bach, Handel and Scarlatti as her predecessors. Years forward of Brahms or Reger, her Etude No. 106 melds Romanticism with a Bachian chorale.
One of many difficulties of rediscovering Montgeroult has been the slim historic paper path. Solely 24 copies of her Cours complets survive in libraries at the moment; her solely baby didn’t protect her letters or manuscripts. One essential supply comes from Montgeroult herself, who wrote prolonged introductions to the Cours complets. ‘I’ve an actual sense that she utterly understood the practicalities of what she was asking folks to do,’ Hammond says. ‘She should have been a very formidable pianist. She focuses on making a singing tone, which was fairly a novelty at the moment. And you may inform she was a really delicate trainer from the way in which she phrases issues.’
What else can we learn about Hélène de Montgeroult?
Hélène de Montgeroult should have been fairly phenomenal, I feel, intellectually and musically.’ She was additionally, says Hammond, resourceful. Earlier than the Marseillaise incident, Montgeroult had already been by means of tough occasions. Married to the Marquis de Montgeroult, she discovered herself in Nice Britain in 1792 on a secret diplomatic mission on behalf of the French royal household.
The next yr, they headed to Naples as diplomats, however all the delegation was kidnapped en route by Austrian troopers. Her husband was held in a dungeon, whereas Montgeroult was ultimately let loose from jail. As soon as out, she tried to assist these nonetheless held captive. ‘She was good at understanding who had affect and how you can pull strings. We will see that from the letters she wrote when she was making an attempt to get the others out of jail.’ Montgeroult had some success however not, alas, for her husband, who died earlier than he could possibly be launched. She married twice extra and gave start to her son, father unknown.
We now have these vibrant tales and tantalising glimpses of Montgeroult, although she lacked a public profile to rival the celebrated Romantic composers and pianists who succeeded her.
Performing in public was out of bounds for the aristocracy, nor does she seem to have craved the limelight, however in her lifetime her expertise was famend amongst connoisseurs. Behind closed doorways, her salon attracted the crème de la crème of society. One in all her associates was the novelist Madame de Staël, who could have immortalised her within the 1807 novel Corinne.
Extra importantly, for this story at the least, de Staël could have impressed Montgeroult to publish her work. It’s due to her music being in print that, after two centuries of silence, Montgeroult has a second probability.
