Monsieur De St George
By
Last month, Searchlight Pictures announced plans for a movie about Joseph Boulogne, the 18th-century composer also known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
When
the announcement was made, headlines resurrected yet another moniker
for Boulogne: “Black Mozart.” Presumably intended as a compliment, this
erasure of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white
standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western
classical music history.
Few
musicians have led a life as fascinating and multifaceted as Boulogne’s.
Recounting it, however, is an exercise in educated guesswork. What is
known is scantily and contradictorily documented, when not purely
anecdotal. To make matters worse, a 19th-century novel by Roger de
Beauvoir, “Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges,” intertwined fact and fiction
so seamlessly that many of its fabrications gradually found a place in
Boulogne’s assumed biography.
What we
know is that Boulogne, the illegitimate son of a wealthy French
plantation owner and an enslaved African-Guadeloupean woman, was born
between 1739 and ’49 on the island of Basse-Terre, the western half of
the archipelago of Guadeloupe. When he was about 10, he and his mother
followed his father and the rest of his legitimate family back to
France, where Boulogne was enrolled in elite schools and received
private lessons in music and fencing.
His first claim
to fame, in fact, was as a champion fencer, the best-known disciple of
the renowned master La Boëssière. A painting depicting a match between
Boulogne and the Chevalier d’Éon remains on display at Buckingham
Palace.
Boulogne’s extraordinary
fencing talent led Louis XV to name him Chevalier de Saint-Georges,
after his father’s noble title, even though France’s Code Noir
prohibited Boulogne from officially inheriting the title because of his
African ancestry. He earned a nearly mythical status even across the
Atlantic: John Adams described him as “the most accomplished man in
Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing and music.”
Very
little is known about Boulogne’s musical training. But when
François-Joseph Gossec, one of France’s pioneering symphony writers and
most prominent conductors, founded the Concert des Amateurs series in
1769, he invited Boulogne to join its orchestra, first as a violinist
and later as its concertmaster.
Boulogne’s
first documented compositions are from 1770 and ’71. While these are
clearly works by a composer still searching for his voice, they already
demonstrate his commitment to the new and unexplored. The six string
quartets of his Opus 1 were among the first in that genre to be written
in France. His three sonatas for keyboard and violin (Op. 1a) feature
those instruments as equals, breaking away from the Baroque tradition of
basso continuo, which was still very much in vogue. His harmonies,
textures and formal schemes place him within a Classical style that was
still in the process of forming.
His first public and critical success as a composer came with his two
violin concertos (Op. 2), which premiered in 1772 at the Concert des
Amateurs series, featuring Boulogne himself as soloist. The level of
craft and sophistication in these pieces far surpass his efforts of the
previous two years. The particularly beautiful Largo movement of the
second concerto already features many trademarks of his later style,
including a penchant for whimsical colors that run the range of
instruments and an understanding of how to balance orchestral forces
with clarity.
When Gossec was
invited to direct the Concert Spirituel series in 1773, he named his
concertmaster as his successor. Under Boulogne’s direction, the Concert
des Amateurs orchestra became widely regarded as the best in France, if
not all of Europe. His raised profile as a conductor led to an
invitation in 1775 to apply for the directorship of the Académie Royal
de Musique, the country’s most prominent musical position. His
candidacy, however, was crushed by a petition to Marie Antoinette from a
group of performers who objected to “accepting orders from a mulatto.”
Also
in 1775, he wrote two symphonies concertantes for two violins and
orchestra (Op. 6), his initial contribution to a genre he and other
French composers of the time helped define. A hybrid of the Baroque
concerto grosso and the Classical concerto, a symphonie concertante
usually featured two or more soloists in a virtuosic dialogue that
emulated a musical duel. Boulogne wrote eight such pieces between 1775
and ’78, a testament to the demand for them among French audiences.
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