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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253318398 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/1993 |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Marguerite Long
A Life in French Music, 1874â"1966
By Cecilia Dunoyer
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1993 Cecilia DunoyerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-31839-8
CHAPTER 1
Marguerite Long's Youth
Childhood in Nîmes: 1874–1886
Marguerite Long's earliest childhood memories are inseparable from the sunny skies, the fragrance, and the beauty of her native Nîmes, an old Roman town in the south of France, where she spent the first thirteen years of her life. She was bom on November 13, 1874 at 14 Grande Rue, but shortly thereafter her family moved to Rue Pavée, where her father, who had a passion for flowers, cultivated a beautiful garden. Throughout her life, she could close her eyes and conjure up the intoxicating perfume of honeysuckle, jasmine, and clematis, which were particularly pungent after her father's evening watering. As a toddler, nothing could stop her from crawling down the few steps to inhale voluptuously the fragrance of the earth. To watch the belles de nuit close at night was for her a great mystery. This is where her lifelong passion for flowers was bom, and where her imagination began its rapid development. When her father would scold her because she was walking around at night with her face up in the air, she would answer that she was looking at the stars. In fact she was trying to count them.
Marguerite's parents were not musicians. Her father, Pierre, originally from the Drôme region, somewhat north of Nîmes, worked for the railroad. But her mother, Anne Marie Antoinette, who was a native of the Ardèche region, also north of Nîmes, had a good musical instinct, and little Marguerite was not allowed to play wrong notes.
If her father had given her a love for flowers, it was her sister, Claire, eight years older, who planted the seed of musical passion. Claire Long was a splendid pianist; at age seventeen she was appointed Professor of Piano at the Nîmes conservatory. She had studied with a German master, Amédée Mager, who had settled in Nîmes. Mager had earned a Premier Prix at the Paris Conservatoire in the class of the famed Antoine Marmontel, whose pupils included Bizet, Debussy, d'Indy, Francis Planté, and Louis Diémer. Claire's fragile health prevented her from leaving home to pursue her studies at the Paris Conservatoire, but still permitted a successful career. Claire was Marguerite's first teacher:
I owe her everything, my sister whose piano was my first piano and whose sensitive and knowledgeable fingers guided the fingers of her baby sister. ... She, who was my first teacher, and probably the best and most loving of all my mentors.
From Claire, Marguerite received a firm base of Franco-German principles of piano playing. She could not remember when she first played the piano: "I feel as though I have always played, as I feel I could always read and write."
Read and write she did at an early age. A touching collection of letters the very young Marguerite wrote to her parents on every New Year were meticulously kept. From the earliest one, dated 1880, to later ones, we can see the shaping of her distinctive handwriting. As a six- and seven-year-old, she was already concerned with the health of both her mother and her sister, and with being a conscientious daughter. On December 31, 1882, she wrote in an already remarkably mature handwriting:
Dear parents,
I am happy to be able to write to you on this happy day. I am committed to be well behaved and to practice my piano and do my homework this year, because now I am old enough to obey you. I pray to God every day that he will keep you here for a long time. I love you very much and to prove it to you I want to be very nice. ... I love Claire and Mommy very much and I pray for God to let them live forever. I hope Claire will not worry anymore and that we will become good friends. I kiss you with all my heart.
Your little girl who loves you,
Marguerite Long
Her earliest musical recollections go back to the days when, at the age of two or three, she would climb onto a stool next to her sister while she practiced. Imitating Claire, Marguerite would turn pages with great speed but without understanding what was on them. Nevertheless, music stirred very strong emotions in her, both happy and melancholic. When Claire played a certain piece by Weber, which was fashionable at the time, Marguerite would be filled with sadness. She would run to her mother's arms in tears and say, "Maman, I don't want you to die." In retrospect, the scene is all the more touching since her "Maman" died when Marguerite was not quite seventeen, a few weeks before she won her Premier Prix at the Paris Conservatoire.
As she grew up, her interests were many and her curiosity unlimited. Marguerite would climb into trees and read for hours. She was at the head of her class in school, and yet, when asked if she liked to work hard, she would answer sarcastically with a famous quotation by the French playwright Tristan Bernard, who once said that work is not made for man because it tires him.
In 1883, when Claire was appointed to the Nimes conservatory, Marguerite entered her class and pursued academic and musical studies simultaneously. Their parents were very supportive and frequently took their daughters to the theatre and the opera. Marguerite had seldom played with dolls until this time. Now she enjoyed dressing them in costumes: she set up her own miniature stage and imagined Romeo and Juliet, Marguerite and Faust, and Othello and Desdemona. Before she was ten she knew Aida, Les Huguenots, William Tell, Lohengrin, and many other operas by memory and would compose paraphrases of her favorite scenes at the piano.
The great Théâtre de Nîmes was an exceptional musical resource. When Marguerite was still young, she would go with her sister to operas and concerts by visiting virtuosos. She remembered in particular a concert by Francis Planté, who was then one of Europe's most acclaimed pianists. Born in 1839, he had played as a child prodigy in every capital and court. His career lasted 90 years, during which he earned the friendship and affection of all the greats: Liszt, Thalberg, Anton Rubinstein, Paderewski, Rossini, Massenet, Saint' Saëns. Planté had great charisma on stage, and he made a lasting impression on the eight-year-old Marguerite Long. She met him later, and never missed a chance to hear him play. For his part, he wrote a number of endearing letters to Long, whose career he followed through the years.
The stage fascinated her, and it was with tremendous exaltation that she made her first public appearance in 1886, at the age of eleven. Having just obtained a Prix d'Honneur at the Nîmes Conservatory, she performed Mozart's D minor Concerto with orchestra. The honors ceremony was held in the same Théâtre de Nîmes, one of France's most beautiful eighteenth-century theatres. (It has, unfortunately, since been destroyed by fire.)
I can still see myself with my pink dress and white shoes, walking on that stage, which was quite vast: I felt I was drawn toward the greatest destiny! And when my beloved sister came to sit next to me, treating me like the little pupil (which I was), I felt deeply humiliated and pushed her away, gently but with willful energy.
Marguerite felt entirely in her element, sitting on the stage by herself, in front of a piano and an orchestra. From that day dates her first review: "This young lady, ahead of whom lies a bright musical future, is gifted with an architectural sense as rich as it is powerful, and with fingers of a rare dexterity" (Progrès du midi, August 1, 1886).
Even when she was quite young, Long felt a great sense of pride at being able to perform. Yet she did not perform widely throughout Europe at a tender age, as other child prodigies did; instead she was sheltered by a very protective and conservative French family. But she never let an opportunity to be heard go by. Whenever she visited friends with her family, she expected to be asked to play.
Marguerite Long's parents and sister fueled and guided the child's insatiable appetite for intellectual and artistic life, but at the same time they emphasized the need for hard work and discipline. The parents made a deliberate effort to provide Claire with a sound musical education, and Marguerite always benefited from being included. One of the most striking musical experiences of her childhood occurred when the family went to Paris to hear the Concerts Colonne at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Marguerite was eight years old; it was the first time she heard an orchestra. She said that it was perhaps on this occasion that she first aspired to perform on that particular stage. Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was on the program. The performance made such a profound impression on her that for the rest of her life she was always deeply moved by that work.
She thrived on strong emotions from an early age, whether they were triggered by the warm scents in the air, the obsessive sound of crickets, music, or the theatre. But also, there were the bullfights. She recalled the corridas with passion:
This exalting spectacle in the Roman arenas of Nîmes, on the burning stones, filled to the highest tier with a packed crowd under the arrows of a dazzling sun; the entrance of the Spanish quadrilles dressed in silver and gold; the Toreador music from Carmen — I still shiver at the memory of it.
By the age of ten, she was a real aficionada of the sound-filled and bloody drama of the bullfights. The ultimate punishment her father could impose was to keep her from going to the corrida on Sunday. "You cannot imagine what that penance represented for me."
The first thirteen years of Marguerite Long's life shaped her temperament forever. She felt like a true méridionale, a woman from the south of France. Even though she lived in Paris for the remaining 80 years of her life, her friends and pupils said she always kept a slight accent du midi, a delightful sunny streak in her speech that contributed to her charm. She had the warmth and passion typically attributed to southerners, along with a sharp sense of humor and an arresting directness.
From Nîmes to Paris
Less than a year after Marguerite's public debut came a visit from Paris of Théodore Dubois,* composer and National Inspector of Conservatories, disturbing the relative comfort of her life in Nîmes. He heard the young girl and strongly suggested to her family that she pursue her musical vocation in Paris. Pierre Long and his wife were terrified and could not even consider letting their twelve-year-old daughter go to Paris by herself. Marguerite's mother was in poor health and could not have accompanied her daughter to the capital. The whole idea was rejected. A year later Théodore Dubois was back for a further evaluation of the Nîmes conservatory. The pupil he had heard the previous year had made extraordinary progress, and he was determined. He knocked at the Longs' door and announced: "Madame, one does not have the right to leave this child in Nîmes. She will be a great pianist." Elegant, with a narrow beard which further elongated his face, Théodore Dubois was delicate but persuasive. The Longs were convinced and began to make arrangements.
Marguerite was to travel to Paris with her father. Once there, he would leave her in a convent run by a distant relative, where she would pursue her general education while studying at the Conservatoire. She was thirteen years old. Their first departure, in 1888, was a false start: the Paris Conservatoire had cancelled the entrance examination that year. Marguerite had to go back to Nîmes for another year. Finally, in 1889, the year of the Great Exposition, she entered the Cours Préparatoire at the Paris Conservatoire and earned the Première Médaille at the end of the year. In a touching homage to Long written shortly after her death, the composer Henri Biisser reminisced:
It was in 1890 that I met Marguerite Long. She was in the Classe Préparatoire of Mme [Sophie Muller] Chêné. ... Marguerite Long was already a precocious musical genius. ... When I met her, I was eighteen and she, sixteen. We became great friends. I had written a piece for the end-of-year sight-reading competition for Mme Chêné's class. Marguerite Long was the only one who read the piece without one mistake ... and I asked her permission to hug her.
Marguerite was then admitted to the Classe Supérieure under Henri Fissot. Fissot had a beautiful sense of sound, and Long always felt indebted to him for having taught her at a young age to listen for good sound quality. As may be suspected, her austere routine in Paris was a drastic change from life in her sunny Provence. She was always chaperoned, and her only outings were to her classes at the Conservatoire three times a week. This did not give her much of a chance to meet or play with her classmates.
But thanks to her vivacious and independent temperament, Marguerite was able to make good progress, and in one year at the Classe Supérieure level, won her Premier Prix from the Conservatoire on July 24, 1891. The competition consisted of performing a technically brilliant Allegro de Concert by Ernest Guiraud and sight-reading a piece by Massenet, two works composed expressly for the occasion. Both composers were in the jury, as was Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896), then Director of the Conservatoire. Marguerite Long recalled this competition with her usual wit:
The "concours" was not as it is today. It was in late July ... it was very hot and because of the sight-reading exam, we were all locked in a large room so that we could not consult with outsiders. We had to stay in that room from noon until the end of the "concours," which ended at God knows what time. So you can imagine what that meant. ... But they had thought of everything and had put up a large folding screen in a corner of the room (I'll never forget) with the necessary implements behind it so that when the need arose, we could hide back there and pour out whatever overflow was caused by our nerves. Fortunately, the Conservatoire has become more humane today!
Marguerite Long was now sixteen; she had won the highest honors at the Paris Conservatoire in only two years. Yet she felt a great vacuum. On the day of her victory, the Director found her in tears in the courtyard of the Conservatoire. He patted her on the shoulder and tried to comfort her: "Dear, you will get something next year." He was rather confused when he discovered she was a Premier Prix winner. Long felt her time at the almighty Paris Conservatoire had gone by too fast. She suddenly realized that playing the piano was to be her whole life and that if she wanted to be a great pianist, the hard work had not even begun. And yet she had officially graduated from her studies. She felt she did not know anything and that she was now on her own. Her mother's death a few weeks earlier only compounded the complexities of her emotions. It was the overwhelming realization that she was at a turning point in her life: she had to take care of herself, emotionally as well as financially. She also knew she had to continue her general education, which she always believed was of prime importance for any artist worthy of the name.
It is at this point that her old teacher from the Classe Préparatoire, Madame Chêné, intervened and introduced Marguerite to Madame Gamier-Gentilhomme. "I was very fortunate," Long recalled:
Since I had no family in Paris at all, Madame Gamier-Gentilhomme practically adopted me. She was a remarkable woman, who owned and ran one of the most coveted private schools in Paris, where courses in literature were taught by guest professors from the universities. She was a highly cultured lady, with a powerful organizational talent, and she was for me a marvelous role model.
Marguerite Long lived at the Garnier-Gentilhommes' from 1891 to 1898. To contribute her share, she gave piano lessons to their son in preparation for the Paris Conservatoire entrance competition. Throughout her life Long valued the education she received during her seven years in that home. Madame Garnier-Gentilhomme often entertained, introducing Marguerite to the Parisian milieu of artists, intellectuals, and politicians. She held musical and literary salons, which were always very well attended and gave her young boarder a chance to exhibit her talent among eager and cultured ears. Reviews of the time document not only Long's successful debuts in this milieu but also the prominence that these evenings held in Paris.
Marguerite quickly learned to be at ease in these circles, a skill she used ingeniously all her life. She frequently went out — horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne, ice skating, dancing at balls — free at last from the rigidity of the convent. She enjoyed having a good time and claimed that she was a very good dancer. While she knew how to have fun, she was also well aware of the demands of the career she envisioned for herself. While completing her secondary studies, she took chamber music and harmony courses at the Conservatoire. She started teaching in order to support herself; she did not enjoy it very much, but she was attracted by its challenge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marguerite Long by Cecilia Dunoyer. Copyright © 1993 Cecilia Dunoyer. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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