Marie Jaëllaus romantic

Marie Jaëll, née Trautmann (* 17 August 1846 in Steinseltz; † 4 February 1925 in Paris) was a French pianist, composer and piano teacher.

Life

Marie Jaëll was born in Steinseltz (Département Bas-Rhin). She first studied piano with Franz Hamma in Stuttgart before Henri Herz recognised her exceptional talent and taught her privately in Paris from 1857. In 1862, he accepted her into his piano class at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she was awarded the Premier Prix de piano just four months later. Her successful debut in 1855 was followed by several years of concert activity, initially in the local area, Alsace, southern Germany and Switzerland.

In 1866 (on 9 August) she married the pianist Alfred Jaëll, moved to Paris and gave concerts with him throughout Europe and Russia. Marie Jaëll seems to have particularly loved playing for four hands; it was part of her repertoire and concert activities from the age of fourteen. With her husband Alfred, she transcribed and played many pieces of her time for four hands.

Little is known about her training as a composer; after 1870 she received lessons from Camille Saint-Saëns – who had already dedicated his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D major op. 17 to her in 1858, and then the Étude en forme de valse op.52,6 in 1877 – and César Franck.
Independent works were written from 1877 onwards and were also printed immediately.

Franz Liszt, whom she met in 1868 and with whom she then took lessons, was particularly influential artistically. After the death of her husband (February 1882) she came into closer contact with Liszt. Between 1883 and 1885, she spent several months a year with him in Weimar, doing proofreading and secretarial work for him. Liszt, who considered Jaëll one of the leading pianists of her time, dedicated his Third Mephisto Waltz (1883) to her and also held her in high esteem as a composer. He introduced her to Johannes Brahms and Anton Rubinstein. In 1887, through the mediation of Saint-Saëns, she was one of the first women to be admitted to the Société des compositeurs in Paris.

In the early 1890s she began a series of cyclical concerts in Paris (six concerts of works by Robert Schumann in 1890 at the Salle Erard and six concerts of Liszt works in 1891 at the Salle Pleyel), among which the first performance of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas (1893) is particularly noteworthy.

In the mid-1890s, she largely ceased her concert and compositional activities and increasingly withdrew in order to develop a psychophysiologically based reform of piano playing technique, which she published in several books. She took Liszt’s piano playing as her point of departure. What soon became known as the “Méthode Jaëll” was adapted and further developed by her students (including Albert Schweitzer, Blanche Selva, Jeanne Bosch van’s Gravemoer and Edward del Pueyo).

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Jaëll