CECILE CHAMINADE: THE UNRIVALLED PERFORMING PIANIST

Unlike many women composers of earlier centuries, Cecile Chaminade, born in Paris in 1857, was fortunate enough to be recognized and fêted in her time, even though, sadly, she faded into obscurity.  Her songs, ballet music and piano pieces lost the popularity they had at her performances in England and the United States.  One of the few pieces played occasionally later on was the Flute Concertino in D major, Opus 107.

Coming from an upper middle-class family, Cecile was prevented by her father from attending the Paris Conservatoire, in spite of the fact that she was a child prodigy who played the piano early on and composed by the age of seven or eight:  her work greatly impressed Georges Bizet.  Her mother cleverly managed to contact various well-known French musical instructors in piano, violin and musical composition and Cecile was not deterred by her father’s restriction, giving her first public concert at the age of eighteen.  After that, she became more and more well known for her performances of her own piano pieces and songs for salon, most of which were published.

She toured France, giving concerts countrywide and by the age of thirty-five was enthusiastically received in England, promoted by the head of the Paris Conservatoire, Isidor Philipp.  During one of her tours, she was a guest of Queen Victoria.  Her frequent visits to England continued throughout the 1890’s when she also arranged premieres involving various woman singers, until her popularity started to wane after 1899 as a result of poor reviews.

Eventually at the age of forty-four, she married an older man, Louis-Mathieu Carbonel, a music publisher from Marseilles.  He died six years later and Cecile did not remarry.  Years earlier, her younger sister, Henriette, had married the well-known composer and pianist, Morris Moskowski.

After her husband’s death, she decided to remain free to pursue her career as performer.  It was at this point in 1908 that she visited the United States where she was received with open arms:  in fact, a number of Chaminade clubs were established in America.  She also had the honour of an invitation from President Teddy Roosevelt to play at the White House and she performed at the famous Carnegie Hall in New York and Symphony Hall, Boston.

While in the United States, she played her own compositions such as The Scarf Dance,  The Flatterer and Ballet No 1 for piano and orchestra (performed at the Academy of Music with the Philadelphia Orchestra), various orchestral works and the ballet, Callirhoë.  Among her most popular songs were The Silver Ring and Ritournelle.  Most of the four hundred works she composed were published and included about a hundred and twenty-five songs, ballet music, a comic opera called La Sevillane, a dramatic symphony, Les Amazones, for chorus and orchestra, orchestral suites and chamber works.  She was acknowledged as being a great composer, regardless of being a woman.

Early in 1901, she made her first gramophone recording of seven works, under the label of The Gramaphone and Typewriter Company, subsequently recording many piano pieces before and after World War 1, in the current vogue of chamber music.  In 1913, as the highlight to her musical career, she became the first woman composer to become a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur as bestowed by the French government.

From early on, she had the disadvantage of not being allowed to attend the Paris Conservatoire and become part of the professional Parisian musical circle because of her father’s prejudice against careers for women.  It was not the same to have had private instructors and tutors from the Conservatoire.

Circumstances dictated that she support herself and her family after her father’s death.  Because of this constraint, she needed to perform and gain a public following in the then vogue of chamber music, songs and small ensembles played at home.

Because she had not had the traditional Paris Conservatoire teaching, she was regarded as an outsider, in spite of the official accolades for her work in performance and composition.  Her energy was focused on performance in various countries and she probably had little time for involvement in the latest trends in musical composition as time moved from the mid to late Romantic Period and innovators such as Wagner and Richard Strauss emerged.

In my view, she suffered unfairly from discrimination for various reasons:  she was an outsider, her piano pieces were difficult to play and she became the target for unwarranted criticism of her work based on gender prejudice.  Her salon music was ‘too feminine’ and her orchestral pieces ‘too virile.’  The critics (male) had a field day of sexism, forgetting, for instance, the censure levelled at Liszt for his complicated piano works, which were nevertheless accepted as worthwhile.

Gradually, however, she recorded less, becoming less and less known until she died in obscurity in Monte Carlo at the age of eighty-six.