Those Whom the Gods Love...
artikel
• David Hackett
In the history of western music, there are few things more poignant than youthful genius cut off in its prime.
Here we examine (and celebrate) the lives of five lesser-known composers from the last three centuries, each of whom briefly lit up the skies before all too hastily returning to the shadows.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (Born 4 January 1710, Lesi. Died 16 March 1736, Pozzuoli)
Our first composer, Giovanni Pergolesi, was the James Dean of Baroque music: a rising star one moment, gone the next, forever talked about afterwards. He managed to achieve in a ridiculously short career what many composers struggle to attain over a full lifetime.
Born in 1710 in Jesi, on Italy’s eastern seaboard, it was clear from an early age that the young Giovanni had an unusual musical gift. At the age of 15, he was sent off to Naples to study at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo, where he quickly gained a reputation as a skilled violinist, organist and composer.
Pergolesi’s big break came at the tender age of 23, with his opera seria, Il Prigionier Superbo (The Proud Prisoner). But it was not Il Prigionier itself that brought the house down but rather the two-act comic (buffa) intermezzo entitled La Serva Padrona (The Servant Mistress) which Pergolesi had slipped into the middle of the work. This cheeky piece about a maid outsmarting her boss would quickly attain a great popularity in its own right, becoming the 18th-century equivalent of a viral hit.
It was so popular that when it was later performed in Paris, it sparked the so-called "Querelle des Bouffons" (Quarrel of the Comic Actors) – a heated debate between fans of serious French opera and enthusiasts of the new Italian comic style. Pergolesi inadvertently became the poster child for this operatic showdown.
Despite his burgeoning success, Pergolesi's health was frail. Afflicted by a deformed leg, likely due to polio, and by the deadly onset of tuberculosis, he eventually sought solace in a Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli.
It was here that he composed his best-known work, a setting of the Stabat Mater. Legend has it that he wrote the music in a feverish frenzy, racing against time to complete it before his impending demise. Whether or not this tale is entirely accurate, it certainly adds a dramatic flair to his story.
On March 16 1736, at the tender age of 26, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi took his final bow. He was laid to rest in the Franciscan monastery, having left a mark on the musical world that would influence composers for generations to come.
Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (Born 27 January 1806, Bilbao. Died 17 January 1826, Paris)
We now come to a composer who sadly failed to reach even his third decade. But not everything was inauspicious about the brief but brilliant life of Arriaga. Hailing from a musical family in Bilbao, in northern Spain, he had one of the grandest names of any composer – Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola. He also shared a birthday with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (exactly fifty years apart), and like Mozart was a child prodigy. For these reasons he was later dubbed the "Spanish Mozart”.
By the age of eleven, Arriaga had already written his first opera, Los Esclavos Felices (The Happy Slaves). “Without any knowledge whatsoever of harmony, Juan Crisóstomo wrote a Spanish opera containing wonderful and completely original ideas” was the verdict of one of his tutors several years later.
At the age of 15 Arriaga was more than ready to leave Bilbao and continue his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. When the crusty Conservatoire director Luigi Cherubini first heard one of his compositions, he exclaimed excitedly, "Who wrote this?" When informed it was the young Spaniard, he responded, "amazing – you are music itself!"
Arriaga not only excelled at his studies, but even became a teaching assistant at the Conservatoire, dazzling both students and staff with his sophisticated grasp of harmony and counterpoint. At one point he composed a fugue for eight voices, which Cherubini is supposed to have declared "a masterpiece."
It's impossible to know how this inspiring youngster might have developed had he not tragically succumbed to a lung ailment ten days shy of his 20th birthday. Although his creative life had been brutally short, he still found the time to produce a handful of compositions (including a symphony and three string quartets) that remain quietly impressive for their originality and emotional depth, showcasing a maturity that belied his tender years.
Julius Reubke (Born 23 March 1834, Hausneindorf. Died 3 June 1858, Dresden)
The early nineteenth century seems to have been a particularly bad time for anyone wishing to be a great composer while successfully negotiating a normal life-span (aside from poor Arriaga, think of the likes of Weber, Schubert, Chopin and Mendelssohn...).
Poor Julius Reubke was particularly unlucky, cut short almost before he had got started. Born in the German village of Hausneindorf (in the Harz mountains) he came from a family steeped in musical tradition. His father Adolf was an important organ builder, and two of his brothers would go on to follow in the family business. But Julius had other ideas - he didn’t want to build organs, he wanted to play them. And most importantly, to create exciting, ground-breaking new music for them.
By 17, he was already attending Berlin’s Conservatory, making friends with conductor Hans von Bülow, who was so impressed (“the best student at the conservatory”) that he passed his name on to Franz Liszt. The latter duly invited Reubke to continue his studies with him in Weimar.
The young Reubke might have felt he had the world at his feet, if only he wasn’t already showing signs of advancing tuberculosis. Aware that time was short, he pushed himself to new heights at Weimar, turning out the two monumental works on which his reputation now lies: a Piano Sonata in B Flat Minor and Organ Sonata on Psalm 94 (both from 1857).
Although the former shows a certain influence of Liszt, it still more than holds its own as a great work. As for the latter, it was Reubke’s masterpiece, and is now regarded as one of the great organ works of the nineteenth century. Barely recognisable as "traditional" organ music. Reubke’s sonata is full of fiery, virtuosic writing, a thunderstorm in musical form. Based upon a particularly gloomy psalm, and dominated by minor-key tonalities, the organ often sounds like it’s channelling the wrath of an Old Testament God.
For any other 23-year-old composer, such a stunning piece of music would have been the start of something big. But for Reubke it was already the ending. He spent much of the next year slowly dying, before finally succumbing to the inevitable in June 1858.
“Truly no one could feel more deeply the loss which Art has suffered in your Julius”, Liszt wrote to Reubke senior, “than the one who has followed with admiring sympathy his noble, constant, and successful strivings in these latter years, and who will ever bear his friendship faithfully in mind.”
But while we’re left wondering at what more Reubke might have accomplished, we can still be grateful for those two wonderful and eternally fresh-seeming sonatas he left behind.
Guillaume Lekeu (Born 20 January 1870, Heusy. Died 21 January 1894, Poitiers)
Like Julius Reubke, the name of Guillaume Lekeu would surely be better known today had his life not been so cruelly abbreviated – in his case, by a contaminated sorbet (leading to typhoid fever) one day after his 24th birthday. At the time of his death he was already an accomplished composer with several major works under his belt.
Although essentially a late Romantic, influenced by both César Franck and Gabriel Faure, Lekeu had a highly original mind and a naturally forward-looking sensibility. Had he lived longer, one feels he would have had something interesting to say for many decades to come – even, one suspects, in the post-Romantic world of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Lekeu’s childhood was divided between the quaint village of Heusy, near Verviers in Belgium, and Poitiers in central France, before his family finally wound up in Paris in the late 1880s. Despite having shown himself an accomplished musician, he only really decided upon a musical career after a pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1889 to hear some operas by Richard Wagner (this may well have been the 19th-century teenage equivalent of attending a rock concert and coming back with dreams of starting up a band).
Upon returning to Paris, he continued his private studies in composition with two distinguished teachers, César Franck and Vincent d'Indy. It was d’Indy who would hone his orchestration skills and encourage his ambitions. In 1891 Lekeu competed for the Belgian Prix de Rome, winning an impressive second prize with his cantata Andromède.
Over the next three years, Lekeu would build impressively on this success, with a series of chamber works and orchestral pieces, with his music demonstrating a growing emotional depth and an ever-more innovative approach to structuring his ideas. He once said of his approach to composing: "even more, it will be weird, mad, horrible, anything you like, but at least it will be original". His most famous work is his wonderful Violin Sonata in G Major, commissioned by renowned violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.
Then, sadly, came the tainted sorbet. Lekeu was buried in a small cemetery in his childhood home Heusy, leaving behind a body of work that continues to attract interest today, ensuring that his voice remains a vibrant part of the classical music canon.
Lili Boulanger (Born 21 August 1893, Paris. Died 15 March 1918, Mézy-sur-Seine)
Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger was born into a family of such cultural accomplishment that many others in her position might have felt slightly intimidated. She shared her childhood home (in Paris’ 9th arrondissement) with her mother, Raissa Myshetskaya, a Russian princess and singer, her elderly father Ernest Boulanger, a conductor and composer of comic operas who had snagged the prestigious Prix de Rome way back in 1835, and her older sister, Nadia, destined to become one of the great musical educators of the twentieth century.
But Lili appeared to take all of this in her stride. Although there must have been some rivalry between the sisters, Nadia also served as an important support and inspiration for Lili throughout her short lifetime. Of the two of them, it was probably Lili who showed more promise and originality as a composer.
Despite her evident gifts, Lili was already dogged by sizeable cracks in her health. She had suffered from chronic illnesses since early childhood, including a bronchial pneumonia contracted at age two which had left her immune system weakened. These health issues often interrupted her studies and creative pursuits, but they never dampened her determination – nor indeed her courage.
In 1912, at the age of 19, she decided to compete for the prestigious Prix de Rome. Although she had to abort her first attempt after collapsing during the exam, she returned the following year and this time carried off the first prize with her cantata Faust et Hélène. It was a stunning achievement, not least as she was the first woman ever to win the competition.
Over the remainder of her short life, Lili composed several more cantatas, along with various vocal and orchestral works. Her compositions were always forward-looking for their time, building on the impressionist-symbolism of Debussy, while remaining alive to the very latest musical currents in France. But the long and interesting creative career that now seemed to beckon for this young woman was sadly not to be, as she succumbed to intestinal tuberculosis in March 1918, aged just 24.
Dealt a very different hand, her elder sister Nadia lived on for another sixty years, becoming famous for her teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, as well as at the Royal College of Music in London and Juilliard School in New York.
As with Pergolesi, Arriaga, Reubke and Leuke, we can only wonder at what else Lili Boulanger might have achieved as a composer, had she only been granted a comparable amount of time.