Hélène de Montgeroultaus romantic

Hélène de Montgeroult Hélène de Nervo de Montgeroult (2 March 1764 – 20 May 1836) was a French pianist and composer.

Life

Hélène de Montgerault’s parents moved from Lyon to Paris to give their daughter and her brother better educational opportunities. It is not known when Hélène’s first music lessons 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, such as the house of the Rochechouart family. It is not known with whom she learned to compose.

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, among others, whose acclaim she soon won as an artist. In 1793 her husband died in Mantua. In 1797 she married the journalist Charles-Hyacinte His, from whom she 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 was by her second husband His.

A new genre of female artists

Hélène de Montgeroult had a close musical friendship with the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti, and the two artists gave spectacular performances together, particularly in the field of joint improvisation on their instruments, piano and violin. One such “event”, which took place one afternoon in the salon of her summer house in the valley of Montmorency, is described in detail by a guest:

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 steeped in the science of harmony, and are equally adept not only in the succession of chords, musical phrases and the natural succession of passionate accents, but also in the knowledge and use of all the little devices by which effect and expression can be enhanced. Both are endowed with the rare gift of invention and with most astonishing ingenuity. (Translation from the French by Claudia Schweitzer)

The narrator Ange-Marie d’Eymar (1747-1803), French man of letters, politician and admirer of the Enlightenment, continues to vividly convey how the improvised concert ends: It has become evening and dark in the salon (so he tells us), and the spellbound listeners dare not act. Yet, according to d’Eymar, they experience a spectacular epilogue: After the pianist, fatigued from extended improvising 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 salon on a sofa with veil and breastcloth – according to d’Eymar, as if in the grave, wrapped in the shroud and imitating the physiognomy of a dead person. Just as the torch is brought, she awakens “from the womb of death”. She then explains to the spellbound guests that she first wanted to represent death through sounds and then in this way.

By conveying this scene, reference is made to an innovative, “new artist’s image” of a self-confident female musician in the era of musical classicism.

After the Revolution

On 14 February 1793, during the period of political upheaval in the course of the Revolution in France, Hélène de Montgeroult was the victim of two opposing political parties within a short space of time for political reasons: First, she was imprisoned by the Austrians, then accused by the French Revolutionary Tribunal because of her aristocratic origins and sentenced to the guillotine. She was pardoned because of her pianistic skills. The exact course of these events and the circumstances of her rescue are given contradictory accounts; her escape to Switzerland and her stay in Zwickau and incognito in Berlin are unclear.

Soon, on 22 November 1795, she began teaching piano as “Professeur de premièr classe” 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 associated with the violinist and composer Pierre Francois de Sales Baillot, known as Pierre Baillot, who, like her, was already teaching at the Paris Conservatoire in its founding year. He is counted among the founders of a French violin school. Hélène de Montgeroult set 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, having presumably already been completed in 1812.

Buried in Florence

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

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