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Micheline's Blog

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Micheline's Blog

Tag Archives: Saint-Domingue

Le Chevalier de Saint-George: the Black Mozart

12 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Mulatto, Music

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

France, French Revolution, Guadeloupe, Joseph, Marie-Antoinette, Paris Symphonies, Saint-Domingue, Seven Years' War

La Gavotte

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George (1745–1799)
 

Joseph Bologne was born in Guadeloupe, in 1745, and was educated both in Guadeloupe and in France.  In Saint-Domingue, Joseph had studied music with the black violinist Joseph Platon.  But after his family emigrated to France, in 1752, he was enrolled in a private academy and is believed to have been a pupil of Antonio Lolli, one of the finest Italian violinists of the eighteen century.  As for composition, it would appear that his mentor was Francois Joseph Gossec, a fine composer remembered for writing a lovely gavotte, a piece of music often incorporated in a suite or a partita, but rooted in a French folk dance.[i]

Joseph Bologne at Versailles

As we know already, in France, his musical talent opened the best possible doors.  Joseph Bologne was Marie-Antoinette’s music teacher and became the maestro of the Concert des Amateurs,[ii] “a title of extreme respect given to a master musician” (Wikipedia).  He was then appointed director of the Concert de la Loge Olympique, the largest orchestra of his time (65-70 musicians).

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George

The World Première of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, but the divas…

It is in his capacity as director of the Concert de la Loge Olympique, that he directed the world première of Haydn’s six “Paris Symphonies”  which had been commissioned by the Concert de la Loge Olympique.  So, as a denizen of Versailles, Joseph Bologne met Haydn and he also met the white Mozart.  He is one individual whose talent helped override ethnicity, but not altogether.  When Saint-George was appointed director of the Royal Opera of Louis XVI, three divas opposed Saint-George‘s appointment because he was a mulatto.

The Mulatto

Being a mulatto had already been a threat in Joseph’s life.  Before Joseph’s father emigrated to France, he had to flee Guadeloupe where he was suspected of murder.  He sought refuge in France to prevent Nanon and Joseph from being sold as slaves.  Moreover, on 5 April 1762, King Louis XV decreed that people of color, nègres and mulattos, had to register with the clerk of the Admiralty.  Both Nanon and Joseph were registered.  Nanon was registered as being 34 years old.  As for Joseph, he was mistakenly registered as Joseph Boulogne by La Boëssière, his master of arms.  It could be that, by then, Georges, Joseph’s father, had returned to Guadeloupe.  After the Seven Years’ War, France had chosen to keep Guadeloupe rather than New France.

Joseph as Swordsman and Equestrian

His career as a musician may have suffered because of the divas’s refusal to be seen next to a mulatto, but Joseph has other talents.  La Boëssière had a fine student.  Joseph became one of the finest swordsmen in Europe, if not the finest, as well as an extraordinary equestrian.  His talents and reputation as an athlete served him well when divas rejected him.  He excelled as an athlete and it brought him recognition.

Joseph as Soldier

But Joseph de Bolo(u)gne is remembered not as an athlete but as a prolific composer of the classical era (Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven).  His compositions are listed in his Wikipedia entry.  Joseph served in the army of the Revolution against France’s foreign enemies, but he is not known to have participated in the misfortune of his student, Marie-Antoinette, and her husband.  On the contrary, his father having been ennobled in 1757, Joseph was an aristocrat at a time in history when aristocrats were almost systematically executed.

False Accusations

Technically speaking, Joseph de Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George survived the French Revolution, but barely.  In 1793, he was accused of using “public funds for personal gain.”  (Wikipedia).  He was acquitted, but in the meantime he had spent 18 months in jail and upon his release, he no longer had patrons.  Most had been guillotined.  Joseph did direct orchestras on a few occasions, but too few.  He died a poor man, in 1799 at the age of 54.

I have not paid much attention to Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George’s role in the military.  Moreover I do not know why Napoléon ordered that the Chevalier’s works be destroyed.  I need to read the books that are now being published on Joseph Bologne.  These and CDs of his music are available from Amazon.com.  Moreover, there are  biographical videos on YouTube.  I will insert them in a separate post.

Conclusion

In the history of music, Joseph de Bologne is considered an important figure not only because of the music he composed, but also because he was one of the earliest black musicians to compose what we call “classical music.”  In fact, he composed during the “classical era” (1730-1820).  But his story is nevertheless rather sad.  His rise to success was extremely rapid, but he was a mulatto, the ‘black Mozart.’  Moreover, he was jailed for a crime he had not committed.

Related Blogs: 
“C’est mon ami,” composed by Marie-Antoinette (lyrics by Florian)
“Plaisir d’amour,” sung by Kathleen Battle (lyrics by Florian)
The News & the Music of Frederick the Great
The Duc de Joyeuse: Louis XIII as a Composer
Terminology, the Music of Louis XIII & the News (eras in the history of music)
 
© Micheline Walker
September 12, 2012
WordPress 
_________________________
[i] Many folk dances found their way into suites and variations, but some were also solo pieces.  For instance, although a polonaise may be found in a suite, Chopin used it as a solo piece. The same is true of his mazurkas, not to mention the gavotte and the folía, folies d’Espagne, found in Baroque music (1600–1760).  What seems particularly important here is the link between dance and music.     
 
[ii] In eighteenth-century France, an “amateur de musique” was a lover of music. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were “amateurs de musique.”  French is changing. The word may now be used to differentiate professional musicians from musicians who are not professionals. 
 

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John James Audubon, artist & ornithologist

11 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Birds of America, Jacques-Louis David, John Bachman, John James Audubon, National Audubon Society, New Orleans, Saint-Domingue, United States

The American Flamingo, by John James Audubon, Brooklin Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The American Flamingo, by John James Audubon, Brooklin Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Flamingo

John James Audubon (Jean-Jacques Audubon)

Mendelssohn: Lieder ohne Worte, Op.30 – No. 1. (Daniel Barenboim)
(please click on title to hear the music) 
 

Birth in Saint-Domingue

(April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was born in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue, the current Haiti, and was the “illegitimate son of [a] merchant, planter, and slave trader”[i] and a Creole woman.  He was first named Fougère Rabin, or Jean Rabin, but he and his half-sister were legalized by adoption in 1794 and sent to France.

His origins therefore resemble those of Alexandre Dumas, père, the immensely popular author of the Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and La Reine Margot (Marguerite de Valois who was married to Henri IV against her will) and other  historical novels.  But there is a difference.  Financially, Dumas did well early in his career, but John James Audubon’s art did not bring him money until later in life.

Return to America: From Philadelphia to Kentucky

At the age of eighteen (1803), his father sent him to United States where he had a property near Philadelphia.  As a result, Jean-Jacques avoided conscription.  To what extent John James looked after the property is difficult to assess.  He sold that property in 1807 and the following year, he married Lucy Bakewell.

The couple moved to Kentucky, but during his stay in Philadelphia, Audubon had become very interested in ornithology, the study of birds, and had started honing his skills as an artist to become one of a most revered bird-artists.  Sadly, before drawing the birds of America, he killed them and ran a wire through their body so they would look alive.  They posed.

He is said to have boasted that he studied art with Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825), probably the finest among artists who survived the French Revolution.  This may not be the case, but it doesn’t matter since Audubon’s own art reveals considerable artistry.  He used pastel, watercolour and oil.[ii] Moreover, Audubon was both an artist and an ornithologist but, it would appear, the better artist.

Bankcruptcy

After declaring bankcruptcy, he travelled up the Ohio and Mississipi Rivers in search of birds.  He wife was tutoring and whenever he came to a town or village, he would do portraits, which provided him with the money he needed to identify and make paintings of all the birds of America.  It was an extremely ambitious project which he completed successfully.

Aimophila estivalis        

   The Great Blue Heron  

New Orleans

He and his wife moved to New Orleans c. 1821, in the former Louisiana, a French colony sold to the United States in 1803.  Shortly thereafter, he travelled back to Europe, exhibited his work and looked for an engraver.  The engraver he hired was Robert Havell 1793-1878) and, in 1827, the first (4 vol. 435 hand-coloured plates) of the 87 portfolios that would eventually constitute the depiction of 1,065 birds was published.  With the assistance of Scottish naturalist and ornithologist William MacGillivray, Audubon also published “an accompanying text,” his Ornithological Biography.

Audubon goes to Europe: the King as Sponsor

John James found sponsors and patrons in Europe, including the king of England.  Yet by now he had spent a fortune having his artwork put into book form.  He therefore published a less lavish and shorter Ornithological Biography, 5 vol. (octavo, 1831–39).  A Synopsis of the Birds of North America (1839), which served as an index.
 

The Snowy Egret

Audubon was then able to return to the United States and settled in a “spacious” house on the Hudson River (Manhattan, New York).  There he prepared a smaller edition of his Birds of America, 7 vol. (octavo, 1840–44).  However, his work was not over.  He illustrated the Reverend John Bachman‘s three-volume The Viviparious Quadrupeds of North-America (1845-1853), which his sons completed.
 

John James Audubon died at the age of 65.  Fifteen years later, in 1866, the National Audubon Society was established.

According to Richard Rhode, quoted in Wikipedia, John James truly loved birds: “I felt an intimacy with them…bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life.”[iii] The Wikipedia entry also reveals that he attended military school during the years he lived in France and that his father had owned a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue, the current Haiti.

In so many areas, the internet is a miracle.  For instance, one can see in a wealth of details many of Audubon’s paintings of birds.  As well, the National Audubon Society sells an Audubon calendar that not only keeps a person up to date, but does marvels for the decoration of one’s kitchen.  The Society also provides information on bird sanctuaries and has a little marketplace.

_________________________

[i] “John James Audubon.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 11 Mar. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/42629/John-James-Audubon>.

[ii] “John James Audubon,” Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 7th edition (Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, 2003[1897]) p. 80.

[iii] Richard Rhode, John James Audubon: The Making of an American  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 4. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon>.

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Dumas, père & Marguerite de Valois fictionalized

10 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Literature, Mulatto

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Alexandre Dumas père, François Clouet, Henri IV, La Reine Margot, Marguerite, métissage, Nadar, Saint-Domingue

Alexandre Dumas, père, by Nadar

Alexandre Dumas, père, by Félix Nadar*(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Félix Nadar* was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1 April 1820, Paris – 23 March 1910), a very famous photographer.

From Alexandre Dumas père to Marguerite de Valois

As I mentioned in my post on John James Audubon (16 April 1785 – 27 January 1851), there is kinship between the artist-ornithologist and Alexandre Dumas père. John James Audubon was born in Saint-Domingue, the current Haiti, to a French father and a Creole woman. As for Alexandre Dumas père, he was born in Villers-Cotterêts on 24 July 1802 and died near Dieppe, on 5 December 1870.  But there is a Saint-Domingue connection.

Indeed, Dumas père’s father was the son of the “Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman and Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Therefore, Alexandre was métissé.  Let me quote what he said to a person who found fault with his lineage:

My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.

Moreover, both were extremely productive.  They were in fact passionate about what they did.

Imagine the hours Dumas spent at his desk writing The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and several other historical novels one of which is La Reine Margot, whose story is linked with the growth of absolutism and the related persecution of the Huguenots or French Calvinist Protestants.  You may remember that Marguerite did not want to marry Henri IV, king of Navarre and a protestant who became Henri IV of France after he converted to Catholicism.

Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615)

Dumas’s La Reine Margot (1845)

  • In La Reine Margot (Queen Margot), Dumas focusses on Marguerite’s wedding to Henri IV, kin of Navarre, which took place on 18 August 1572, five days before the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  Again you may remember that her marriage to Henri IV was an arranged marriage and that, because he was a Huguenot, Henri IV stood outside Notre-Dame de Paris while he was wedded.  It appears she had a liaison with Henri, duc de Guise, a leader among Catholics.
  • By extension, Dumas also focusses on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which took place in the early morning hours of 24 August 1572, six days after Marguerite was unwillingly wedded to Henri IV.  Huguenots had come to Paris for the wedding, which meant they were trapped.  So not only was the marriage an arranged marriage, but Catherine de’ Medici took advantage of favorable circumstances to manipulate her son Charles IX into ordering the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  Although she had been compelled to marry Henri IV, king of Navarre, Marguerite protected him.
  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Dumas focusses on Marguerite’s subsequent affair with Count Joseph Boniface de La Môle (c. 1526 – 30 April 1574), a nobleman who had befriended François d’Alençon, a prince of the blood and brother to Charles IX, Henri III (duc d’Anjou).  La Môle was accused of having participated in the Malcontent’s conspiracy of 1574 and, specifically, of having tried to murder king Charles IX.  Despite Marguerite’s pleas, La Môle was tortured and beheaded, place de Grève, in Paris.

Such a story was of course perfect fodder for a novelist and fabulous material for filmmaker Patrice Chéreau whose treatment of the subject was tactful. Chéreau’s Reine Margot, 1994, starring Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Virna Lisi and Vincent Perez was both an artistic and a box office success.

Conclusion

However, I am reflecting that, although she lived a dissolute life, going from lover to lover and plotting, Marguerite de Valois was Marguerite de France and, the last of the Valois line.  She ended a dynasty.  Had it not been for the Salic law, commissioned by the first king of all the Franks, Clovis I (c. 466–511), she would have been queen of France after her brother Henri III died.  Instead, the man she married unwillingly and who would not have anything to do with her, became king of France and king of Navarre.  But she refused to have their marriage annulled while his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, was alive.

Marguerite was forced into a marriage.  She was a helpless witness to the torture and decapitation of La Môle and, in 1586, her brother Henri III banished her for eighteen years to the inaccessible castle of Usson, in Auvergne.

Yes, Marguerite lived a rather dissolute life, but she was an exceptionally well-educated woman whose Mémoires, written in comfy detention, thanks to Guise, have literary merit.  Moreover, when she was free to return to Paris, in 1605, she had a castle built where she was a hostess to writers, artists, intellectuals and, perhaps, lovers.  I was taught that she was a “nymphomanic.”

However, she continued to write not only her Mémoires, published in 1658, but also poetry.  As the French would say, “elle avait des lettres” or she was well-educated.

After her release, she cultivated a friendly relationship with her former husband, Marie de’ Medici, his wife, and their children.

I am not about to attempt a rehabilitation of Marguerite de Valois, but let’s just say that, somehow, I understand.

The Young Marguerite de Valois, by François Clouet

_________________________ 

“Margaret Of Valois.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/364625/Margaret-of-Valois>.

Barenboim plays Mendelssohn Songs Without Words Op.53 no.1 in A flat Major

© Micheline Walker
12 March 2012
WordPress
 
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