World Premiere: Unknown - Published in 1779
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work.
Instrumentation: 2 oboes, 2 horns, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 11'
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, one of music history’s most fascinating figures, was born on Christmas Day 1745 on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where his father, a French civil servant, was stationed as comptroller-general; his mother was a Black islander. The family moved to Paris when the boy was ten. Joseph was enrolled in the academy of Nicolas Texier de La Boëssière, one of France’s most renowned fencing masters, and there received a good general education as well as rigorous training in swimming, boxing, horse riding and other physical and social skills; he became one of the finest fencers in Europe. Saint-Georges’ musical education was less well documented, though he apparently had shown talent as a violinist even before leaving Guadeloupe and seems to have been a student of the celebrated composer François Gossec for several years. He joined Gossec’s orchestra at the Concert des Amateurs in 1769, made his debut there as a soloist three years later (in two of his own violin concertos), and became concertmaster and conductor of the group shortly thereafter.
In 1777, Saint-Georges entered the employ of the Duke of Orléans, and four years later took on the additional position of concertmaster of the Concert de la Loge Olympique, for which Claude-François-Marie Rigoley, Comte d’Ogny commissioned Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies. Saint-Georges acted as intermediary in finalizing the arrangements with Haydn, and he presumably directed the premieres of the works. Following the death of the Duke of Orléans in 1785, Saint-Georges spent some time in London, where he gave exhibition fencing matches before the Prince of Wales and other aristocrats, and posed for a portrait by the Boston-born painter Mather Brown that shows him to have cut an extremely handsome figure. Saint-Georges returned to Paris two years later, and resumed his work with the Loge Olympique. That orchestra was disbanded following the upheavals of 1789, however, and he again went to England. He was back in France the next year to demonstrate his revolutionary sympathies and tour as violinist through the northern provinces, and in 1791 he settled in Lille, where he became a captain of the National Guard. The following year he was made a colonel in the Légion des Américains et du Midi, which comprised “citizens of color” (one of whose mulatto officers was the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas père), but he was accused of misappropriation of regimental funds and imprisoned at Houdainville for more than a year. He was eventually cleared of the charge and released, and made his way back to Paris, where he lived in considerable poverty. He briefly became director of a new musical organization, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, but died of a stomach ulcer in 1799.
Saint-Georges’ music, agreeable and polished without being profound, is in an early Classical idiom that shows the influence of the Mannheim composers and his French contemporaries. His seven operas met with little success, so his fame as a composer rested primarily on his instrumental works: two symphonies, more than a dozen solo violin concertos (cleverly constructed to show his own virtuoso technique on the instrument), several examples of the sinfonia concertante form popular in Paris in the 1770s, and a number of quartets, sonatas and chamber pieces.
Saint-Georges’ two symphonies were published together as his Op. 11 in 1779; the second was re-used as the overture to the opera L’Amant Anonyme (“The Anonymous Lover”) the following year. The three movements of the Symphony No. 2 in D major are arranged according to the familiar fast–slow–fast plan favored by the early Classicists. The opening sonata-form movement takes a bold, striding melody as its main theme and a delicate, trilling strain as its second subject. The central passage is brief and only vaguely concerned with the main theme, which is omitted from the recapitulation so that only the delicate second subject returns. The poignant, lightly imitative outer sections of the Andante are balanced by an animated central episode. The finale is an unusual sonata structure, with properly contrasting main and second themes in the exposition that are repeated exactly in the recapitulation, with an extended central portion that is derived thematically from the second subject but accompanied by the bounding rhythm of the first theme.
©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda