Benjamin Godard

The music of French composer Benjamin Godard, whose meteoric rise to fame through the past due 1870s earned him an over-all popularity that eluded the majority of his Parisian contemporaries, has fallen right out of the overall repertory since his loss of life in 1895. Godard was created in Paris on August 18, 1849, and was educated in the violin as a youngster (he was luckily enough receive lessons from famous virtuoso Henri Vieuxtemps). After getting into the Paris Conservatoire in 1863 (structure with Henri Reber) and producing two unsuccessful bids set for the Prix de Rome (1866 and 1867), Godard gained a living being a violist until his music started to attract the interest of publishers through the final many years of the 1860s. Godard’s status as an experienced and prolific composer grew continuously through the 1870s, so when his Le Tasse (dramatic symphony for chorus, soloists, and orchestra) was granted the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1878 Godard came into leading rank of Parisian music artists. Godard gained additional interest when his music was produced a concentrate of conductor Jules Étienne Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires; Godard himself required over direction from the concerts through the middle-1880s, renaming them the Concerts Modernes, however the series by no means regained the achievement it experienced accomplished under Pasdeloup. A pastime in opera through the 1880s and 1890s resulted in the creation of five dramatic operas, all well-known failures (although “Berceuse” from your 1888 opera Jocelyn is definitely Godard’s just well-known function). A comic opera, La vivandière, was remaining unfinished in the composer’s loss of life in 1895; the orchestration of the task was completed by another musician and the task was premiered in Paris later on in the entire year. Provided Godard’s instrumental history, it isn’t amazing that his chamber and symphonic functions have probably the most to provide performers and listeners. The five symphonies (some with fanciful game titles, e.g. Symphonie gothique or Symphonie orientale), while probably less rewarding compared to the music for violin (five sonatas for piano and violin, two concertos, which the Concerto romantique is definitely the superior, and a significant single violin sonata), are even so more advanced than the operas, which fall rather lacking their dramatic ambitions because of too little potent musical chemical. Godard appears to have acquired small innate sympathy for the piano, and, although functions for this device actually constitute a considerable part of his total result, his piano music is normally rather trite. Probably Godard’s widespread popularity being a salon composer compelled him to compose such trifles, but he had not been a miniaturist in mind, and his initiatives within this vein are usually unsuccessful. From 1887 on Godard was an associate from the faculty on the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1889 he was called a Chevalier from the Légion d’honneur.