Ermel, Louis-Constant

Louis-Constant Ermel – Stabat Mater (1840) / New print

(Ghent, 27 December 1798 – Clermont-Ferrand, 3 June 1871)

Louis-Constant Ermel came from a family of musicians and harpsichord and piano builders. His father, Symphorien Ermel (Saint-Symphorien near Mons, 1761 – Ghent, 1842), settled in Ghent in 1790 as a piano builder, but was also a pianist, piano teacher and singer. He also composed romances, among other things. He was his son’s first music teacher, who then went on to study at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won various first prizes, including for harmony and piano. Louis Ermel then won the ‘second Premier Grand Prix de Rome’ in 1823. The compositions he sent to the Institut de France in Paris during his study trip and his stay at the Académie de France in Rome, as stipulated in the rules of the Prix de Rome, were favourably received, and the Parisian music world saw him as a great musical promise. These expectations were not entirely fulfilled, which some attributed to the reluctance of Parisian opera houses to program new works. His one-act opéra-comique Le testament premiered in Liège in 1836 and was also performed at La Monnaie in Brussels two years later. But it was mainly outside the opera that he enjoyed success with masses, cantatas, songs, but also with instrumental works such as a piano concerto (1826), a Rondeau polonais and a Rondeau toccata for piano (1828), a Fantaisie et variations pour piano et cor sur un thème de Ch.-M. Weber op. 4 (1829), a symphony (1844) which is currently missing, and an Adagio for piano and orchestra (1853). …

read more / weiterlesen / Flemish preface … > HERE