Mélodie pour le piano-forte

Louise Farrenc’s Mélodie pour le piano-forte appeared in 1846 in a collective volume glorifying Beethoven: the Beethoven-Album, published in Stuttgart and bringing together artists from Germany, Holland, Sweden, Hungary, Russia, England, Italy and France. Some offered poems, but most contributed a short score paying tribute to the tutelary figure whose influence was omnipresent in mid-century musical Europe. Most of the French composers who were invited came from the Paris Conservatoire – Adolphe Adam, Antoine Elwart, Fromental Halévy – or from the chamber music scene – such as Léon Kreutzer and George Onslow. Among them it is therefore no surprise to find Louise Farrenc, a piano teacher at the Conservatoire from 1842, who seems to have taken the opportunity to have a short piece by her daughter Victorine, then twenty years old (a Romance pour piano-forte) published alongside hers. Rather than a Beethoven pastiche, Louise Farrenc’s ternary Mélodie evokes the Parisian style of the 1840s and reminds one of expressive pieces by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Sigismund Thalberg and Charles-Valentin Alkan. Also, the “piano-forte” for which it was written is not the late-eighteenth-century instrument: the range of over six octaves required for the last two systems – that make the performer travel from a climax in the treble to a fading away in the bass – exceed by far the Classical organological capacities and bear witness to the Romantic advances in the pianistic field.