Volume 54, Number 13 · August 16, 2007
Paris: The Black Maestro
By Darryl Pinckney
The Chevalier de Saint-Georges:Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow
by Gabriel Banat
Pendragon, 566 pp., $56.00
One of the first French composers of string quartets and symphonies concertantes was of mixed-race origins—a mulatto, as they used to say. Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born on Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a planter and his slave mistress. As a free black and illegitimate, Saint-Georges could not have inherited his father's property, but his father had the foresight to send him to school in France, where he became a renowned swordsman and violinist. Between 1773 and 1781 he was conductor of the Concert des Amateurs, one of the finest private orchestras in eighteenth-century Europe, which helped to give expression to the changes in musical tastes then occurring in Paris. He conducted the première of Haydn's 'Paris' symphonies in 1786 with the Concert de la Société Olympique, the orchestra of the Masonic lodge he belonged to, and prepared the manuscripts for publication.
Review, 4492 words
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