“Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
Cécile Louise Stephanie Chaminade was born in Paris. From earliest childhood she exhibited a composer’s imagination. Writing in the music magazine Etude in 1908, she explained that her games involved musical composition: “I was perpetually under the influence of music, so that my dolls danced to my pavans and I made up slumber-songs for my dogs,” By age eight she had composed sacred works; and on hearing her perform, Georges Bizet advised her parents to provide her with a sound musical education. She studied piano with Le Couppey; counterpoint, harmony, and fugue with Savard; and composition with Benjamin Godard, whose taste seems to have marked her own decisively. A practical jokester, Chaminade at one lesson determined to repay Savard for his dry pedantry and patronizing approach to her aspirations as a composer. She recopied an obscure fugue by J. S. Bach and presented it as her own work. Proclaimed Savard, “But it’s all full of blunders! You will not listen! Why do you not remember what I tell you?” To which Chaminade replied, “Oh, I beg your pardon, maître, but I have made a mistake. The fugue is not mine—it is one of Bach’s.” Savard followed with a long silence and then carefully continued his criticisms, skillfully turning them little by little into praise of the excellent counterpoint.
Cécile Chaminade made her debut as a pianist at eighteen, and in 1875 she toured France and England, frequently performing her own works. In 1892 the French government appointed her an Officer of Public Instruction and later named her Chevaliere de la Legion d’Honneur. She died in 1944 in Monte Carlo.
Chaminade’s compositions became the vogue in the elegant salons of the Belle Epoque. This very popularity among amateurs has led to the conclusion, perhaps unjustified, that her music lacks depth. Her own remarks in the 1908 Etude article apply to her current appreciation as well as to that of many women composers: “How limited is the number of those whose criticisms are unaffected by what others say. The great majority of people . . . are prevented by inertia and often by ignorance from revising opinions which are incomplete or hastily formed.”
A renewed assessment is needed of Chaminade’s oeuvre, which consists of more than 350 works in virtually all major genres. Among the most popular today is her Concertino for Flute and Orchestra (1905). In 1908 Chaminade made her American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra, performing her Concerstück of 1896. She also wrote a large choral symphony, Les Amazones (1890); a symphonic ballet with full orchestra, Callirhoe (1888); and a comic opera, La Sevillane (1882). She composed more than 100 mélodies, to texts by Silvestre, Sully Prudhomme, Hugo, and Grand-mougin, poets also favored by Fauré and Massenet.
Chaminade’s piano compositions number over 200, of which her Sonata in C minor, Opus 21, is perhaps the finest example. Reprinted here is the second movement, Andante, which shows at once her quintessential lyric idiom, her capacity for deep inspiration, and her excellent compositional skills. The movement is cast in an ABA’ form, with the sections beginning in mm. 1, 40, and 84. The opening motive of four notes unifies the entire compositon skillfully: Chaminade treats it to successive variations of register, intervallic set, texture, and dynamics in the A section, then recalls it subtly in mm. 52 and 75 of the strongly contrasted B section. She employs the overall key relationship of A-flat major to B major to A-flat major, an enharmonic lowered mediant relationship of the sort preferred throughout the nineteenth century and cultivated widely by her late-century contemporaries in France and Germany. The key of the B section is implied by related progressions, and the effect of tonality is rarified by reserving the tonic chord until the section closes. Paralleling a practice heard frequently in her contemporaries Brahms and Fauré, Chaminade obscures the recapitulation of the first section by blending the transition out of section B, which relies on the A section motive, with the outright return of the main theme. The sense of formal blurring is enhanced by the delay of the tonic A flat until m.85. Originally published in 1895, Chaminade’s Sonata in C minor is an eloquent example of late-Romantic piano music, and it relates more closely to Brahms’s Opus 117 and Opus 118 piano works than to post-Romantic French contemporaries. One ought to judge the merits of the Sonata in C minor solely on the basis of its inherent accomplishments in realizing the idiom Chaminade adopts. Dare we fault Brahms’s Opus 118—a close parallel in time and style—for lacking the tonal explorations of the young Schoenberg?
Recording
Sonata in C minor for Piano. Pines, piano. Genesis 1024.
Sonata in C Minor, Second Movement
Reprinted from Cecile Chaminade, Three Piano Works. Women Composers Series, Da Capo Press, 1979. By permission. Original edition by Enoch et Cie., Paris, 1895.
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