Edouard Nanny
Édouard Nanny (born March 24, 1872 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye , † October 12, 1942 in Paris ) was a French double bass player , composer , instrumental teacher and a pioneer of the so-called historical performance practice .
Early years
Little is known about Nanny's youth, but he seems to have received his first music lessons on the cornet from Carlos Allard, the conductor of an amateur wind orchestra in his hometown. The 13-year-old nanny performed with this orchestra, the Harmonie du Commerce de St. Germain , for the first time as a cornet soloist on July 13, 1885.
Reliable biographical data are only available again from the year 1891. In February of this year, the 18-year-old music student was granted French citizenship , which he had not previously had: his father Jacques Nanny was Swiss and originally from the Appenzell region .
It is not known when the young Édouard moved to nearby Paris, how he switched to the double bass and under what circumstances he began studying music. The choice of this string instrument was in view of Nanny's small and rather slender stature - he was only 1.66 meters tall - an unusual decision at a time when the double bass player was demanded even more athletic performance than today. However, he must have made rapid progress on the instrument, because already at the age of twenty he is mentioned as a prizewinner in Prof. Verrimst's class at the Conservatoire .
After completing his military service in 1894/95, Nanny began a career as an orchestral musician in the ensemble of the important conductor Charles Lamoureux . For Nanny's later career it turned out to be decisive that Lamoureux's repertoire drew on German baroque music ( Bach , Handel ) and late Romanticism ( Wagner ) to an extent that was unusual for France during the Belle Époque . A first nomination of nannies for the double bass professorship at the Conservatoire was rejected by the responsible Ministère de l'Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts in 1902 .
The Société de Concerts des Instruments Anciens
In the meantime, Nanny had also received a permanent engagement in the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique , which in turn opened up contact with members of the Casadesus family of musicians . Henri Casadesus in particular had already begun to deal with baroque music, its instruments and historical performance practice before 1900. Some popular operas of the 19th century may have served as the original inspiration for this, such as Giacomo Meyerbeer's Huguenots , whose score provides for the instrumentation of a viola d'amore , a baroque string instrument that was already completely out of use at the time.
In a comparatively short time, Nanny and Casadesus tried out an extensive repertoire of works from the French, Italian and German high baroque, including pieces by composers such as Jean-Baptiste Lully , Marin Marais and Benedetto Marcello, who were largely forgotten at the time . In addition to chamber music performances as a duo or other small ensembles, the two musicians also presented one of the first modern baroque orchestras in France. A particularly successful guest appearance in the Concerts Colonne in 1900 ultimately led to the establishment of the Société de Concerts des Instruments Anciens (Concert Society for Old Instruments) under the patronage of the composer Camille Saint-Saëns in the following year .
The virtuoso
From the baroque repertoire, Nanny also largely borrowed the works on which he built his reputation as a leading double bass soloist in France over the next two decades; because contemporary works for solo double bass were rare around 1900. The last internationally famous double bass virtuoso was the Italian Giovanni Bottesini (1821–1889); However, for reasons that cannot be precisely identified, Nanny hardly resorted to his quite extensive oeuvre of compositions for the instrument.
On the other hand, he arranged numerous works of the Baroque and Viennese Classics , mostly those for violin or cello , for his own instrument. At Nanny's pioneering work well some go Arrangements back that are today a widespread repertoire for bass, including sonatas by Benedetto Marcello (originally for cello), Gavotte from Joseph-Antoine Lorenziti (originally for violin) and the Bassoon Concerto K. 191 (186e ) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . Nanny was also the first double bass player to perform some movements from Bach's cello suites (especially from BWV 1007). However, he initially played this in the transposition typical of the contrabass in the 16 ' register , i.e. an octave lower than notated. It was only in the course of the 1920s that the introduction of the newly developed steel strings made it easier to perform in the octave corresponding to the cello, which is now considered the standard.
Teaching at the Conservatoire
In the first years of the 20th century, Nanny became one of the most respected exponents of his instrument in France. At the Opéra-Comique he had meanwhile been appointed 1st double bass player. In spite of all this, it would take over a decade and a half before another application for the double bass professorship at the Conservatoire was finally crowned with success. On October 1, 1919, Nanny took over this prestigious post, which he would hold for twenty years until March 1939.
The Enseignement Complet
After several years of experience as a lecturer, Nanny began to bring his teaching methods and his knowledge of instrumental technology into a structured form. The result of this work was the two-volume school Enseignement Complet de la Contrebasse ("Complete training on the double bass"), which was first published in 1931.
Nanny's personal views about the requirements that a well-trained bass player had to meet in his day shape the textbook deeply. A novelty, for example, was that a teaching method was expressly offered for the five-string double bass for the first time.
The Méthode complète (as the book is usually called) progresses considerably faster in conveying musical content than the much more extensive textbook by the Austrian Franz Simandl . At least in the French-speaking world, Nanny's work quickly overtook the Simandl volumes, which had previously been considered authoritative. This is shown by the example of François Rabbath , who comes from Aleppo in Syria and made his first steps as a professional musician in Beirut . In Rabbath's youth, the Lebanese capital was in extremely intensive cultural exchange with Paris due to the French League of Nations mandate . The only textbook for the double bass that the young musician was able to get hold of under strange circumstances was that of Nanny. Rabbath reports of his disappointment when, after arriving in Paris in the mid-1950s, when applying for admission as a student at the Conservatoire, he found out that his musical role model had died years earlier.
The fifth string
Although Nanny had become known through his commitment to baroque music, he was equally committed to instrumental-specific innovations that he considered necessary in the context of the further development of the double bass playing. In particular, this concerned the possibilities for an expansion of the tonal range .
The apparently remote question of the stringing and tuning of the double bass sparked a heated controversy in French musical life at the time, because it was not only discussed with technical and tonal, but also with political arguments.
In the Romance countries (Italy, France and Spain) the three-string double bass was still used well into the 19th century. These instruments offer a light, transparent sound, which is suitable for a virtuoso style of playing in the style of the Romance tradition, but which could not meet the symphonic demands of the German composers (leading in this field at the time) for the range.
Under the influence of important composers such as Hector Berlioz , whose music was often perceived by large circles of the French public as being too "German" and which was therefore highly controversial, the four-string double bass gradually established itself as the standard in orchestras in the last third of the 19th century by. Even a musician like Nanny, who actually belongs to a later generation, stuck to the "traditional" three-string string for his virtuoso concerts and for playing in baroque ensembles.
On the other hand, as the first bass player in France's leading opera orchestra, Nanny was also aware of the shortcomings that were already clinging to the four-string bass due to recent trends in composition and orchestration . Once again, musical influences from German composers (Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss ) made themselves felt, who called for a further expansion of the low string register.
Since the approaches to solving this problem also came from Germany, namely the introduction of the five-string double bass (instrument maker Carl Otho, Leipzig 1880, and double bass player Romano Ebert on the initiative of Hans von Bülow ) or the invention of mechanical devices to expand the range, such a thing happened Question - also and especially in view of the almost always tense relationship between France and Germany during Nanny's lifetime - unexpectedly about cultural politics in the music world.
There were also contemporary French composers whose music required an expansion of the tonal spectrum of the double basses: At the Opéra-Comique, Nanny herself participated in the premieres of Gustave Charpentier's controversial sensational success Louise (1900) and Claude Debussy's scandalous Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) . For many of his rather bourgeois-conservative colleagues at the Conservatoire, the reference to such modernists, who both had been expelled from studying at this same university under less edifying circumstances, did not seem very convincing.
With the help of his influential position at the Conservatoire, Nanny finally pushed through the introduction of the five-string against the other options available (tuning of the bass in fifths , C-machine heads) in the French orchestras. An extensive correspondence with colleagues, violin makers , but above all the director of the Conservatoire, Henri Rabaud , testifies to the enormous and sometimes very ideological resistance that the bassist had to fight against.
Nanny and Ravel
The contemporary musician in whose work Nanny's advances in playing technique of the double bass found immediate echo was the composer Maurice Ravel , who was almost the same age . He was already famous during his lifetime for his extraordinary skills in the field of orchestration; two of his most popular works to this day, namely the Boléro and his orchestral version of Mussorgski's Pictures at an Exhibition, are essentially based on this special talent of the composer. Unlike most other well-known composers, Ravel paid particular attention to the deepest string instrument. Alfred Planyavsky goes so far as to grant him “a special position in the treatment of the double bass” from the perspective of the entire European music history. He brings this intimate knowledge of the technical characteristics of an instrument that Ravel did not play himself in direct connection with Édouard Nanny and refers to a statement by bassist Jacques Cazauran :
“It is actually the case that Nanny Ravel gave precise information about playing the harmonics . In addition, I know from the stories of older colleagues that in the years 1926–30, Ravel was often to be found at the double bass desks in the orchestra of the Lamoureux Concerts , to ask the players about possible ways of performing our instrument. "
Compositions and educational works
Édouard Nanny joined, as mentioned above, especially as the agent of older works out, he in a way the bass modern arranged . The transcriptions he obtained were published by his Parisian publisher Alphonse Leduc in a series entitled Les Classiques de la Contrebasse . Nanny's own compositional work was relatively small and concentrated mainly on pieces of a didactic nature. A curiosity is the fact that Nanny's best-known and most frequently performed composition was published by him under the name of the Italian virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti , a contemporary of Ludwig van Beethoven .
In the context of the Enseignement Complet
As supplementary material to the content presented in his double bass school, Nanny published several volumes of studies . These include the self-written Vingt études de virtuosité and the Vingt-quatre pièces en forme d'études sur des traits de symphonies . The latter represent a somewhat more formal approach to the genre of orchestral studies, which is widespread in classical didactics. Nanny's routine in dealing with suitable violin literature is evident in his arrangements of violin etudes based on Federigo Fiorillo and Rodolphe Kreutzer . To prepare his students for working with these technically demanding exercises, he wrote the Quatre études préparatoires .
Concerts and lecture pieces
In terms of conception, the ten études caprices that Nanny had already designed as lecture pieces for his advanced students are even more complex . His Berceuse and the Concerto in E minor follow the tradition of late romantic instrumental music .
The "Dragonetti Concert"
After Édouard Nanny had been known for many years for his knowledgeable handling of older baroque and Viennese classical music, the audience was pleasantly surprised when in 1925 he published a concerto allegedly rediscovered by Domenico Dragonetti . A publication note, which indicated that Nanny had revised it, was printed on all editions of the Classiques de la Contrebasse series , and this was interpreted, in accordance with current practice in publishing, to mean that the editor had intervened in some details of the execution and the accompaniment .
Since the “Dragonetti Concerto” now seemed to be an extensive, technically demanding and audience-effective work by the first great double bass virtuoso, which bassists all over the world liked to perform, the authorship of the Italian was never seriously questioned for decades. This is surprising insofar as the British Museum has an extensive estate from Dragonetti in which there is no reference to this concert; Nanny himself gave no verifiable information about his sources either.
It was only in connection with his new edition of the concert that bassist David Walter was able to prove, almost 80 years after its first publication, that the concert, which supposedly dates back to the Viennese Classic, was entirely a composition by Édouard Nanny. Apparently the Frenchman seemed to have satisfied a fashion from the early years of historical performance practice, which valued alleged musical rediscoveries more than contemporary reproductions, however authentic they may have been.
According to Walter's remarks, it would be wrong to assume that Nanny's malicious intent to deceive. The bassist rather composed a bravura piece staged on several musical levels, in which he wanted and was able to shine not only with his instrumental technique, but also with his intimate knowledge of the musical language of the Viennese classic in general and Dragonetti's style in particular. From the point of view of copyright law , Nanny even damaged himself by presenting his own work as a mere adaptation of an original that was around 100 years old and therefore no longer protectable. Other "edited editions" appeared, especially after the Second World War, in the USA, Germany, Austria and the Soviet Union, without Nanny or his publisher being able to intervene.
Honors
After a few years in civil service, Nanny was awarded the title of Officier de l'Instruction Publique on February 10, 1923 , which was by no means unusual for a deserving teacher at an internationally renowned educational institution such as the Paris Conservatoire. On the other hand, the fact that the cross of the Legion of Honor in the lowest rank of Chevalier was awarded to him only in the last years of his life, namely on January 28, 1939, testifies to the lifelong tension between the contentious musician and his ministerial superiors . In 1946 the composer Eugène Bozza published the concert piece Sur le nom d'Édouard Nanny for double bass and piano in memory of his late mentor and friend .
Notes and individual references
- ↑ This decision by the Minister of Culture, Joseph Chaumié , caused considerable excitement in music-loving Paris in November 1902, as several surviving and quite polemical press articles show. Chaumié had expressed his rejection against the recommendation of the Conservatoire, which amounted to a scandal and brought harsh accusations of nepotism, artistic incompetence and prejudice against the person of the candidate.
- ↑ Only a few reviews of lecture evenings in the French provinces, many of which the young virtuoso completed in the 1890s, show that Bottesini's tarantella was probably an integral part of Nanny's program at that time.
- ↑ Other sources give the years 1920 to 1940.
- ↑ Rodney Slatford mentions this year in his New Grove article on the history of the double bass. The editorial information in the various editions of the textbook itself is not uniform.
- ↑ According to Rabbath's short biography in his Solos for the Double Bassist . An almost identical text is available on the website of his music publisher .
- ↑ A relic of this tradition can still be found today in the coblas , which accompany the Catalan national dance Sardana , and in which a three-string contrabaix is part of the proper style.
- ↑ Patrick Süskind's popular play The Double Bass offers a parodic, but correct description of this development in all musical historical details .
- ↑ Planyavsky, p. 321
- ↑ Planyavsky, p. 321, footnote 88
- ↑ Doubts were possibly in the room, but were not expressly formulated. Alfred Planyavsky, who otherwise goes into great detail about Dragonetti's life and work, mentions the concert in question only twice; including once in the list of works by the Italian. The other time (p. 327) he speaks of the “so-called Dragonetti Nanny Concerto”, which at the time of the first publication of the history of the double bass in 1970 was by no means the common name of the piece and therefore u. U. can be understood as an indication of the unexplained attribution.
- ↑ Walter's account is attached to the new edition published by Liben in Cincinnati in 2005.
- ↑ In a very similar way, it is assumed that the viola concerto ascribed to Johann Christian Bach was actually written by Nanny's friend and musical companion Henri Casadesus.
- ↑ Rumors that are difficult to test belong in this context. According to them, Nanny was resented that he, who had already been married twice, spent his final years in an illegitimate relationship with the significantly younger Marthe Legris .
literature
- Alberto Basso (Ed.): Dizionario Enciclopedico della Musica e dei Musicisti . Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, Turin 1988, ISBN 88-02-04165-2 .
- Friedrich Blume (Ed.): Music in the past and present . Directmedia, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89853-460-X .
- Alfred Planyavsky , Herbert Seifert : History of the double bass . Schneider, Tutzing 1984, ISBN 978-3-7952-0426-6 .
- Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Oxford University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 978-1-56159-174-9 .
Web links
- Memorial website (French)
- Reviews of the new edition of the "Dragonetti Concerto" (English)
- Recording of a performance of the “Dragonetti Concerto” (1st movement) with the Bogotà Philharmonic Orchestra
- Sheet music and audio files by Édouard Nanny in the International Music Score Library Project
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nanny, Édouard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French double bass player, composer and instrument pedagogue |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 24, 1872 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Saint-Germain-en-Laye |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 12, 1942 |
| Place of death | Paris |