Jenneval

Jenneval. lithograph

Jenneval , actually Hyppolyte-Louis-Alexandre Dechet even Dechez (*  23. January 1803 in Lyon , †  18 October 1830 in Lier ), was a French actor and poet who primarily as an author of the Belgian national anthem, the Belgian national anthem , known has been.

Life

Dechet studied at the Collège Henri IV in Paris. There he made the acquaintance of a banker's son, through whom he found a job at a bank. After only two years he gave up the job to pursue his passion, the theater life. With initially modest success, he began an acting career that took him, who was now called Jenneval (probably after the eponymous drama by Louis-Sébastien Mercier ), to Ajaccio (1824), Marseille (1825) and to the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris ( 1825) led.

In 1827 he went to Lille for about a year , in 1828 he achieved a breakthrough with his appearance at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in the play Comédiens by Casimir Delavigne . He was so well known that the Paris Comédie française noticed him and offered him a role. However, when the July Revolution broke out in Paris in 1830 and the theaters closed their doors as a result, Jenneval returned to his adopted country of Belgium. On August 27, two days after the Brussels performance of the opera Die Mute von Portici , which was to trigger the Belgian revolution , he joined the volunteer corps of his compatriot Charles Niellon, which was supposed to restore public order in Brussels. Carried away by the general uproar, he wrote the first text versions of what would later become the Belgian national anthem, which was set to music by François Van Campenhout a little later .

Only a few weeks later he and 800 Belgian revolutionaries stormed the town of Lier near Antwerp in order to drive away the royal troops who had holed up there. However, when they noticed that they were in the majority (8,000 men), they went over to the counterattack, in which Jenneval lost his life.

this and that

• In 1897 a memorial column designed by Adolf Crick was erected in honor of Jenneval on Martelaarsplein (Place des martyrs) in Brussels, where he also has his final resting place.

See also

• Brabançonne , national anthem of the Kingdom of Belgium

Web links

• Original text of the Belgian national anthem, as it was printed on September 7, 1830 in the Courrier des Pays-Bas at: magasinpittoresque / La Brabançonne . (The text is still relatively Orange-friendly almost two weeks after the performance of the opera " Die Stumme von Portici " and a few days before the first performance of the Brabançonne in the Brussels Opera House on September 12, 1830. The song became the melody Air des Lanciers Polonais sung.)

literature

• Xavier Maugendre: L'Europe des hymnes dans leur contexte historique et musical. Mardaga, Sprimont 1996.
• BEM Speybroeck (Ed.): L'hymne national. Origine avatars et réhabilitation de la Brabançonne. Journal du Corps of June 15, 1987. Brussels (?) 1987.
• Harry D. Schurdel: National Anthem of the World . Atlantis Schott, Mainz 2006.