Hélène de Montgeroult

Hélène (Antoinette Maria) de Montgeroult, b. de Nervo (born March 2, 1764 in Lyon , † May 20, 1836 in Florence ) was a French pianist and composer and the first female professor of piano when the Conservatoire de Paris was founded in 1795.

Life and career

Hélène de Montgeroult's parents moved from Lyon to Paris to give their daughter and her brother better educational opportunities. It is not known when the first music lessons for Hélène began. At the age of twelve (1776) she received piano lessons from Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel , a pupil of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , who taught her his "elegant and correct style". Muzio Clementi (1784) and Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1786) followed as piano teachers . The young aristocrat developed into a brilliant pianist and performed in the salons of Parisian society, for example in the house of the Rochechouart family . It is not known who she learned to compose from.

In 1784 she married the Marquis de Montgeroult (1736–1793), with whom she frequented the famous salons of the writer Madame de Staël and the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun , whose applause she soon gained as an artist. In 1793 her husband died in Mantua. In 1797 she married the journalist Charles-Hyacinte His, from whom she was divorced in 1803. She entered into a third marriage in 1820 with Edouard-Sophie Dunod de Charnage, Comte d'Empire, who died in 1826. She was the mother of a son, Aimé Charles (* 1795), who came from her second husband, His.

A new genre of women artists

Hélène de Montgeroult had a close musical friendship with the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti , and both artists had spectacular performances together, especially in the field of joint improvisation on their instruments, the piano and violin. A detailed historical description of a guest has come down to us from such an "event", which took place one afternoon in the drawing room of her summer house in the Montmorency valley :

“Come and hear Euterpe [Hélène de Montgeroult] and Viotti: how they follow each other, how they see through each other when they answer each other! These two virtuosos are equally imbued with the science of harmony, not only in the succession of chords, musical phrases and in the natural succession of passionate accents, but also in the knowledge and use of all the little aids by which one can achieve effect and expression can increase, equally adept. Both are endowed with the rare gift of invention and with the most astonishing ingenuity. (Translation from the French by Claudia Schweitzer) "

The narrator Ange-Marie d'Eymar (1747–1803), French writer, politician and admirer of the Enlightenment, explains how the improvised concert ends: It is evening and dark in the salon (so he tells), and the banned Listeners don't dare to act. According to d'Eymar, they experience a spectacular aftermath: after the pianist, tired from extensive improvisation with the violinist, has exhausted the passion and “les accens des passions et ceux de la douleur” (the signs of suffering and pain) in the Adagio , she drapes herself in a distant corner of the drawing room on a sofa with a veil and breast cloth - according to d'Eymar, as if in a grave, she is wrapped in a shroud and imitating the physiognomy of a dead person. Just as the torch is brought, it wakes up "from the lap of death". Then she explains to the banished guests that she first wanted to depict death through sounds and then in this [realistic] way.

With the transmission of this scene, an innovative, in the time of the musical classic "new artist image" of a self-confident musician is pointed out.

After the revolution

On February 14, 1793, during the period of political upheaval in the wake of the French Revolution, Hélène de Montgeroult fell victim to two opposing political parties within a short period of time for political reasons: first she was captured by the Austrians, then by the French Revolutionary Tribunal because of her aristocratic origin charged and sentenced to guillotine. She was pardoned because of her pianistic skills. The exact course of these events and the circumstances of their rescue are presented in a contradictory manner, their escape to Switzerland and their stay in Zwickau and incognito in Berlin is unclear.

Soon, on November 22nd, 1795, she began teaching as “Professeur de premièr classe” for piano at the newly founded Conservatoire de Paris . With a salary of 2500 livres per year, she was one of the best-paid teachers there. Around 1800 she was around the violinist and composer Pierre Francois de Sales Baillot, known as Pierre Baillot , who, like her, taught at the Paris Conservatoire in the year she was founded. He is counted among the founders of a French violin school. Hélène de Montgeroult laid down her own principles for her piano playing in a three-volume piano school "Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano", which was printed in Paris in 1820 after it was probably completed in 1812.

Buried in Florence

After an exciting life devoted to music, free of financial worries, Hélène de Montgeroult moved to Florence in 1834 because of the climate, where she died in May 1836. She was buried there in the Church of Santa Croce .

Compositions and writings

• Piano sonatas
• Piano Etudes
• Pièces romantiques for piano
• Sonatas for piano with accompaniment of a violin
• Three-volume piano school Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano , printed 1820

literature

• Claudia Schweitzer: "... is highly recommendable as a teacher". Cultural history of the piano teacher . Series of publications by the Sophie Drinker Institute . Edited by Freia Hoffmann . Bis-Verlag of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg , 2007 ISBN 978-3-8142-2124-3 .
• Sophie Drinker Institute / Claudia Schweitzer: Biography [1]

Web links

• CD with works for piano: Helene de Montgeroult: La Marquise et la Marseillaise
• Editions of sheet music from the 114 études, variations, fugues etc. of the piano school: [2]
• Conference "250e anniversaire d'Hélène de Montgeroult" in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris , program of the conference 4-5. December 2014 , creim.fr , November 25, 2014
• Sheet music and audio files by Hélène de Montgeroult in the International Music Score Library Project

proof

1. ↑ Source: Claudia Schweitzer: Kulturgeschichte der Clavierlehrerin . Pp. 174 ff and 461/62. Further references there.
2. ↑ Schweitzer p. 174.
3. ↑ See biography of the Sophie Drinker Institute ( memento of the original dated November 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Compare Schweitzer p. 177/78 and p. 461.
5. ↑ Quoted from Schweitzer, p. 175.
6. ↑ Ange-Marie d'Eymar: Anecdotes sur Viotti, précédées de quelques réflexions sur l'empression en musique . OO, around 1792.
7. ↑ The complete French text of the story is printed in Schweitzer, pp. 176/77.
8. ^ "M comme Montgeroult", in Improvisaiton so piano , Jean-Pierre Thiollet , Neva Ed., 2017, pp 79-82. ISBN 978-2-35055-228-6
9. ↑ Schweitzer pp. 177/78, footnote 625, 461. See Schweitzer's version from the Sophie Drinker Institute: Archived copy ( memento of the original from November 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
10. ↑ Schweitzer pp. 178/79.
11. ↑ Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy mentions P. Baillot and other Parisians several times in his travel letters from 1831.
12. ↑ cf. Schweitzer / Sophie Drinker Institute: Archived copy ( memento of the original dated November 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.