A British musicologist champions a composer once long lost to time

Few once-obscure composers have experienced a more meteoric return to prominence than Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Bologne, who was known simply as Saint-Georges, was born in 1745 in the French-Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, the son of a white plantation owner and an African slave. He went on to become a dazzling swordsman, gifted athlete, high-ranking officer, well-connected socialite and if all that wasn’t enough, a major musical figure of his time. “I can’t think of any composer whose more extraordinary in terms of his life story,” said Christopher Dingle, a professor of music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in England.

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Mutter Virtuosi will perform the composer’s Violin Concerto in A Major, Op. 5, No. 2 as part of a Symphony Center Presents Chamber Music concert Feb. 5. The program will also feature Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins and Cello and The Four Seasons, as well as Unsuk Chin’s Gran Cadenza. 

Ahead of the concert, Dingle, a specialist in French music, spoke about Bologne’s resurgence, his compositional accomplishments and his 14 violin concertos. Dingle became interested in him about 10 years ago, and funded through a BBC Radio 3 program focusing on forgotten composers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, he has conducted research. Dingle is working on a book about the composer’s sinfonia concertantes and violin concertos, and collaborating with a music publisher on critical editions of some of the composer’s works. 

What do you make of the sudden interest that has sprung up around Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges?

There’s certain degree of [it’s] about time. If you’re being unkind in some cases, it might be bandwagon-jumping. But for the most part, I think most people are earnest about it. It was inspired in part by Black Lives Matter, of course, but also even before that, the push to for recognizing women and other under-recognized composers. Basically, there is a lot of repertoire out there that we don’t hear, and it’s a lazy assumption to think that just because we don’t hear it, it’s not going to be worth hearing, which seems to be a common take on it.

How good a composer was he? Where do you see him fitting into the musical world of his time? 

There is this label, Black Mozart, which is nonsense on multiple levels. Bologne was older than him and the period [in 1778] when Mozart was in Paris, Bologne was at least as famous across Europe. He tends to get compared with Mozart and Haydn, which is unfair. What tends to get performed in concert halls and what most people know, even people immersed in the classical world, is a relatively small number of works, and in Mozart’s case, they are from the 1780s and 1790s. The da Ponte operas are post-1785, for example. The piano concertos that get regularly performed are from the 1780s. In Haydn’s case, they are from the 1780s into the 1800s. Whereas Bologne was operating at a time when Mozart’s music was developing.

There is this myth of Mozart being this wunderkind, and he may have been as a performer. But as a composer, he did take his time to develop. He was not as advanced at 13 as Mendelssohn was. And the Chevalier de Saint-Georges is kind of the epitome of high-style gallant, which was what Mozart and Haydn moved away from in the 1780s. I’m not trying to make the case, therefore, that the Chevalier de Saint-Georges is as great a composer as Mozart and Haydn.

Composition is only one part of what he did, but his works were high exemplars of what was going on in France, which was a different kind of music-making than what was going in Vienna. So they are generally very accomplished works, sometimes highly inspired works and sometimes very moving. For the most part, the works that people tend to hear, the violin concertos and sinfonia concertantes, they are in the gallant style where the music is kind of there as a divertissement. It’s not there as absolute music that you follow in the Beethovenian style. He’s the equal of his French contemporaries, but it’s a musical world that got swept away with the [French] Revolution.

Why did Bologne largely fall into obscurity? Was it prejudice based on his background?

I think it is a combination of things. It’s partly racism but it’s also partly that his music world, the entire culture was swept away. We don’t tend to play [Simon] Le Duc or any of these other figures who were knocking around at the same time as Saint-Georges in Paris, because music very rapidly moved on to other things. Added to that, Napoleon was an out-and-out racist. A lot of stuff would have been lost during the Revolution. Very few manuscripts survived because they were in the houses that were torched during the Revolution. And other stuff that did survive may have been destroyed under Napoleon’s orders. Napoleon banned Black people from being within 12 kilometers of Paris and basically committed genocide in Haiti. Then there’s the fact that the composer’s story itself has become complicated. It was kept alive not least in fencing circles. Then in the 1840s, Roger de Beauvoir wrote this novelization of his life, which bears very little resemblance to reality. But unfortunately, some people in the 20th century thought it was kind of a legitimate source, and some of the mess from that persists to this day.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about him?  

I don’t know if it’s the biggest one, but there’s the notion that because he was exceptionally athletic and a fencer and a boxer, therefore he would have been somebody who walked about with a kind of arrogance. That wasn’t part of the culture for a start. He was somebody, although he could kill someone with his bare hands basically, who took every opportunity to not throw his weight around and was extremely refined and, as we would have said 20 years ago, was quite open to his feminine side. But not an arrogant thug, as is sometimes conveyed. 

What about his Violin Concerto in A Major, Op. 5, No. 2? 

The violin concertos in general, unlike the sinfonia concertantes, which are very much partnership works, are for kind of showing off. This is something where actually the comparison with Mozart is pertinent. His violin concertos and violin writing in general go much higher than any of Mozart’s do — an octave or more higher than Mozart’s concertos. There are clear signs that in Paris the torqued bow was knocking around considerably earlier than it was in Vienna, and it looks like he was an exceptionally early user of it. 

This concerto is of typical French construction in that it doesn’t go into the sonata form where you’ve got a first subject and second subject and then you have a Beethovenian kind of development. Rather it tends to be, if you like, a succession of ideas, some of which then recur in slightly varied forms. It’s more variation than a development. A sort of multiplicity of ideas. This one really has a rather lovely slow movement. Slow movements are relatively rare in French music. Then, almost obligatory for French music, finishing with a Rondo, which is a kind of set of variations. Where it is typical of Saint-Georges is in the energy and joie de vivre of it. There is a sort of refined rhythmic drive.