Madeleine JAEGER

The natural daughter of a twenty-year-old Parisian woman who gave birth to her in Mennecy (then in Seine-et-Oise), Madeleine Jaeger – or Jäger – entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1876 and stayed there for fifteen years, during which time she collected the largest number of Premiers Prix ever awarded to a woman in that institution by that time: Première Médaille for solfège in 1878, Premiers Prix for piano accompaniment in 1885, harmony in 1886, piano in 1889 and counterpoint and fugue in 1891. Ernest Guiraud described her as an ‘excellent musician’ in his half-yearly assessments. She left the school after marrying the composer Henry Jossic (1865-1907), but returned between 1896 and 1899 to work as a solfège coach. She is known to have published only two works, in 1891, mélodies on poems by Leconte de Lisle: Les Étoiles mortelles and La Chanson du rouet. The respective dedications to her ‘cher[s] maître[s]’ Alphonse Duvernoy and Benjamin Godard prove that Jaeger did not content herself with the tuition offered at the Conservatoire. She also composed a Fantaisie for piano and violin (1890) and a Benedictus (1891) in her counterpoint and fugue class. Between 1893 and 1898 she became a sought-after concert performer, heard notably at the Concerts Lamoureux in Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie cévenole and César Franck’s Variations symphoniques and Les Djinns. However, this promising artist had to give up performing and teaching in the last years of the century: struck down by tuberculosis, she died in 1905 in a sanatorium in Leysin (Switzerland).