Boieldieu, François-Adrian

Preface

François-Adrian Boieldieu – Harp Concerto in C major

(b. Rouen, 16 December 1775 – d. at his country estate Jarcy near Paris, 8 October 1834)

(1801)

Preface
Harpists, like wind players, are grateful for every composer who wrote concertante solo works for their instrument; of those who are still present in concert halls today, Georg Friedrich Händel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns and Claude Debussy should be mentioned in particular, while Georg Christoph Anton Wagenseil, Charles-Marie Widor, Gabriel Pierné and André Caplet are well-known, but hardly universally recognised. The French composer Francois-Adrian Boieldieu occupies an intermediate position here, whose mature opéra-comique ‘La dame blanche’ (The White Lady) from 1825 can still occasionally be encountered on stage today, similar to the once somewhat popular overture to ‘Le calife de Bagdad’, the opera with which Boieldieu achieved his breakthrough.

His Harp Concerto in C major from 1801 is a solitaire in several respects, firstly because the composer otherwise concentrated largely on music theatre, and in his already very limited repertoire of instrumental works only four for larger or smaller orchestral ensembles are listed: alongside the 16-year-old’s Piano Concerto in F major, six waltzes and an occasional gallop from the year of his death, it is the Harp Concerto that proves to be Boieldieu’s most important work for this genre. Secondly, the work also seems rather atypical in the context of the entire repertoire because to this day it tends to be the soloists themselves who write for their instrument, but Boieldieu was not proficient at playing the harp; the fact that he was aware of its possibilities is proven by the fact that he had already composed a harp sonata in 1795, which has unfortunately been lost, and later used the harp flageolet effect in ‘La dame blanche’, which was popular at the time.

A look at the history of the instrument reveals a third surprising aspect. When Francois-Adrian Boieldieu moved from his home town of Rouen to Paris in 1795, where he was appointed professor at the conservatory three years later, his immediate neighbour was Strasbourg-born Sebastian Ehrhardt (1752 – 1831), a harp maker, later founder of the piano manufacturing company of the same name and developer of the so-called ‘double échappement’, the epoch-making improvement to the mechanics of the fortepiano that was to make the company of the patent holder, now called Sébastien Érard, the world market leader for decades to come. Before Érard focussed on piano making, he launched the ‘double-action pedal’, which opened up the entire chromatic range to the harp practically at a stroke and thus opened the door to the modern age. To this day, the double-action pedal harp is the international standard and Érard’s invention has not been significantly modified. …

read more / weiterlesen … > HERE