Last month, Searchlight Pictures announced plans for a film about Joseph Boulogne, the 18th-century composer, also known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
When the announcement was made, the headlines resurrected another nickname for Boulogne: “Black Mozart.” Presumably as a compliment, this removal of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates it to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes its truly unique place in the history of Western classical music.
Few musicians have led such a fascinating and multifaceted life as Boulogne’s. However, recounting it is an exercise in educated guesswork. What is known is scarce and contradictory documented, when it is not purely anecdotal. To make matters worse, a nineteenth-century novel by Roger de Beauvoir, “Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges”, so seamlessly intertwined fact and fiction that many of his inventions gradually found a place in Boulogne’s assumed biography.
What we know is that Boulogne, the illegitimate son of a wealthy French plantation owner and an African-Guadalupe slave, was born between 1739 and ’49 on the island of Basse-Terre, the western half of the Guadalupe archipelago. When he was about 10 years old, he and his mother followed his father and the rest of his legitimate family back to France, where Boulogne enrolled in elite schools and received private music and fencing lessons.
His first claim to fame, in fact, was as a champion fencer, the best-known disciple of renowned master La Boëssière. A painting representing a coincidence between Boulogne and Chevalier d’Éon remains on display at Buckingham Palace.
Boulogne’s extraordinary fencing talent led Louis XV to name him Knight of Saint-Georges, in honor of his father’s noble title, despite the fact that the French Noir Code prohibited Boulogne from officially inheriting the title due to his African descent. He obtained an almost mythical status even across the Atlantic: John Adams described him as “Europe’s most successful man in horsemanship, shooting, fencing, dancing, and music.”
Very little is known about Boulogne’s musical background. But when François-Joseph Gossec, one of France’s foremost pioneering symphonic writers and conductors, founded the Concert des Amateurs series in 1769, he invited Boulogne to join his orchestra, first as a violinist and then as a concertmaster.
Boulogne’s earliest documented compositions are from 1770 and ’71. Although these are clearly the works of a composer who still seeks his voice, they already demonstrate his commitment to the new and unexplored. The six string quartets of his Opus 1 were among the first in that genre to be written in France. His three sonatas for keyboard and violin (Op. 1a) present these instruments as equals, breaking with the Baroque tradition of continuous bass, which was still very much in vogue. Its harmonies, textures and formal schemes place it within a classic style that was still in the process of formation.
His first public and critical success as a composer came with his two violin concertos (Op. 2), which premiered in 1772 in the Concert des Amateurs series, featuring Boulogne himself as a soloist. The level of craftsmanship and sophistication in these pieces far exceeds your efforts from the previous two years. The particularly long Largo movement of the second concerto already features many trademarks of his later style, including a penchant for whimsical colors spanning the range of instruments and an understanding of how to balance the forces of the orchestra clearly.
When Gossec was invited to direct the Concert Spirituel series in 1773, he named his concert master as his successor. Under Boulogne’s direction, the Concert des Amateurs orchestra was widely regarded as the best in France, if not all of Europe. His high profile as conductor led to an invitation in 1775 to apply for the direction of the Académie Royal de Musique, the most prominent musical position in the country. However, his candidacy was crushed by a request to Marie Antoinette from a group of artists who opposed “accepting orders from a mulatto.”
Also in 1775, he wrote two concert symphonies for two violins and an orchestra (Op. 6), his initial contribution to a genre that he and other French composers of the time helped define. A hybrid of the Grosso Baroque concerto and the classical concerto, a symphonic concerto generally featured two or more soloists in a virtuous dialogue emulating a musical duel. Boulogne wrote eight of these pieces between 1775 and 1978, a testament to the demand for them among the French public.
In 1778 Mozart traveled to Paris, remained from March to September, and briefly under the same roof as Boulogne, organized by Count Sickingen. It is unlikely, to say the least, that Mozart did not hear Boulogne’s music during this period. Interestingly, Mozart’s first composition after his return to Austria was his Symphonie Concertante in E-flat (K. 364). And in a 1990 article in the Black Music Research Journal, Gabriel Banat points out the striking similarities between an excerpt from Boulogne’s Violin Concerto (Op. 7, No. 2), 1777, and a passage from K. 364 of Mozart, from the following year The gesture in question is repeated in Boulogne’s solo string writing, a difficult sequence that rises to the highest register of the instrument, immediately followed by a dramatic fall, but had never appeared in Mozart’s work until this Presto.
When the lack of funds forced the Concert des Amateurs to end in 1781, Boulogne and his musicians found a home with the newly formed Concert de la Loge Olympique, which quickly earned a reputation as the best orchestra in Europe. It was under this umbrella that Boulogne conducted the premiere of Haydn’s six symphonies in Paris, among many other important commissions.
Discouraged by his persistent lack of success at the opera, by declining sponsorship due to changes in the political scene, and by his increased activism in the French Revolution as an enlisted officer, Boulogne dramatically curtailed his musical activities toward the end of his life. He died in 1799, not a man without money, but certainly a much less relevant and valued figure in French society than he had been a couple of decades earlier.
However, his influence in France and abroad, both as curator and creator, was felt long after his death. It is a remarkable fact that his music has survived two centuries of neglect caused by systemic racism that permeates the notion of a western canon. Neither its omission in the music history textbooks, of the two most used in the United States, receives a brief and vague mention in one and is absent in the other, nor the lack of defense of programmers, publishers and labels Record labels have completely erased it. .
This is the ultimate proof that Boulogne doesn’t need to be anyone’s second best, let alone anyone’s black echo. So yeah, I can’t wait to see the movie. But forgive me the horrible nickname.
Marcos Balter is a composer and professor of music composition at the University of California, San Diego.
