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It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
This week's feature is a piano concerto by a man Sergei Rachmaninoff reportedly called "the Canadian Mozart," André Mathieu (1929-1968), whose score was lost and reconstructed from a recording. He was born into a musical family: his father Rodolphe was probably the first Canadian to make a living as a full-time composer of art music, and his mother was an accomplished amateur violinist. Despite his father's initial refusal to teach him music (Rodolphe often struggled to make ends meet and hoped his son would not follow in his footsteps), the young André was extremely precocious. He was talking and singing before his first birthday, and at one point as a toddler, entirely without his parents' prompting, he climbed up onto the piano bench and picked out "O Canada" by ear. Once his father reluctantly decided that a child so enthusiastic about music should have competent training, André learned remarkably quickly, performing his first solo recital at six with pieces by Schumann alongside some of his own compositions. At seven, he played his own Concertino for Piano and Orchestra in a concert broadcast nationally by the CBC.
At some point, the parallels to Mozart began to extend to his family. It would have been difficult to live in Quebec at that time and not hear about Mathieu. One music critic suggested that André Mathieu might be even better than Mozart, noting that his music was more sophisticated than Mozart's juvenilia. And so, over several years, Rodolphe Mathieu transformed from a reluctant teacher to his son's most active promoter -- much like Leopold Mozart, he never turned down an opportunity to monetize his son's talent, and became prone to exaggerating André's precocity by claiming he was younger than he was or by claiming pieces were composed earlier than their actual dates. At the end of 1936, Rodolphe decided to uproot the entire family to advance his son's career and relocated to Paris, ostensibly to allow André to study there but not without a heavy dose of public promotion. The decline in Mathieu's fame began not long afterward. He continued to have some success even after the outbreak of war forced the family to return to Canada, and in 1941 he won first prize in the composition competition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. But as he entered his teens, he became harder and harder to sell as a "child prodigy," and impresarios began to tire of his father's increasingly obvious exaggerations. In addition, a relentless touring schedule between 1939 and 1943 gave him little time to compose or expand his piano repertoire, which made it difficult to get repeat engagements with orchestras.
For a time, the collapse of Mathieu's performing career as a "child prodigy" seemed to revive his career as a composer. In adolescence, he rebelled against his father's heavy-handed control of his career and spent much of his time around musical colleagues, and in 1946 he went back to Paris on his own for a year to study composition with Arthur Honegger. (A historical footnote: for about five weeks, he lived in a dormitory for foreign students with future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau.) He produced most of his best compositions between 1947 and 1958, in a neo-Romantic style that was to some extent a rejection of his father's avant-garde, atonal music. But the brief revival was a veneer over personal problems that had never gone away. He may have had bipolar disorder; he was rumored to have attempted suicide at least four times in his life, and at other times was prone to grandiose outbursts. He drank heavily beginning when he was as young as fifteen. (Alcohol abuse may have begun even earlier, as family friends reported that his father had sometimes given him a shot of cognac before concerts.) He grossly mismanaged his own career, continuing to rely on his child prodigy persona by putting his own juvenilia on recital programs. He also suffered financially from his father's mismanagement of his early career: because of a contract his father had signed when he first composed the piece in 1943, he had to pay royalties every time he played his own Piano Concerto No. 3 (also known as the Concerto de Québec), even when he played the 1947 revision. His breakdown in the 1950s was spectacularly public. His frequent drunken outbursts, frequently the subject of gossip columns in Montreal papers, caused his concert engagements to dwindle. From 1955 onward his only public performances were in "pianothons" in which he attempted to break endurance records; he was briefly in the Guinness Book of World Records for a continuous piano performance of more than 21 hours. He moved back in with his parents, spent the 1950s and 1960s in and out of rehabilitation for alcoholism, and died suddenly, most likely of cardiovascular disease, in 1968.
When Mathieu died, nothing he composed after 1948 had been published; though some had been performed, it existed only in hand-copied form. Some of his music returned to public awareness when his friend Vic Vogel was hired to compose music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Vogel made the ceremonial music somewhat of a tribute to Mathieu, basing most of it on melodies found in Mathieu's later unpublished works. Several concerts of Mathieu's orchestral and chamber music followed. But one piece was missing from the revival: Mathieu's fourth and last piano concerto, composed in 1948. This concerto was considered his greatest masterpiece, and he performed it numerous times between 1948 and 1955, but the score and parts were lost and for many years no recording was known to exist. But it turned out that Mathieu himself had made a recording of a 1950 concert performance and given the discs to a friend. In 2005, as pianist Alain Lefevre was on a concert tour aimed at reviving Mathieu's work, that friend met Lefevre backstage and gave him the recording. Lefevre and composer Gilles Bellemare reconstructed the score from the concert recording, and in 2013 Mathieu's fourth piano concerto was heard for the first time in almost 60 years.
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Allegro con fuoco
This week's feature is a piano concerto by a man Sergei Rachmaninoff reportedly called "the Canadian Mozart," André Mathieu (1929-1968), whose score was lost and reconstructed from a recording. He was born into a musical family: his father Rodolphe was probably the first Canadian to make a living as a full-time composer of art music, and his mother was an accomplished amateur violinist. Despite his father's initial refusal to teach him music (Rodolphe often struggled to make ends meet and hoped his son would not follow in his footsteps), the young André was extremely precocious. He was talking and singing before his first birthday, and at one point as a toddler, entirely without his parents' prompting, he climbed up onto the piano bench and picked out "O Canada" by ear. Once his father reluctantly decided that a child so enthusiastic about music should have competent training, André learned remarkably quickly, performing his first solo recital at six with pieces by Schumann alongside some of his own compositions. At seven, he played his own Concertino for Piano and Orchestra in a concert broadcast nationally by the CBC.
At some point, the parallels to Mozart began to extend to his family. It would have been difficult to live in Quebec at that time and not hear about Mathieu. One music critic suggested that André Mathieu might be even better than Mozart, noting that his music was more sophisticated than Mozart's juvenilia. And so, over several years, Rodolphe Mathieu transformed from a reluctant teacher to his son's most active promoter -- much like Leopold Mozart, he never turned down an opportunity to monetize his son's talent, and became prone to exaggerating André's precocity by claiming he was younger than he was or by claiming pieces were composed earlier than their actual dates. At the end of 1936, Rodolphe decided to uproot the entire family to advance his son's career and relocated to Paris, ostensibly to allow André to study there but not without a heavy dose of public promotion. The decline in Mathieu's fame began not long afterward. He continued to have some success even after the outbreak of war forced the family to return to Canada, and in 1941 he won first prize in the composition competition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. But as he entered his teens, he became harder and harder to sell as a "child prodigy," and impresarios began to tire of his father's increasingly obvious exaggerations. In addition, a relentless touring schedule between 1939 and 1943 gave him little time to compose or expand his piano repertoire, which made it difficult to get repeat engagements with orchestras.
For a time, the collapse of Mathieu's performing career as a "child prodigy" seemed to revive his career as a composer. In adolescence, he rebelled against his father's heavy-handed control of his career and spent much of his time around musical colleagues, and in 1946 he went back to Paris on his own for a year to study composition with Arthur Honegger. (A historical footnote: for about five weeks, he lived in a dormitory for foreign students with future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau.) He produced most of his best compositions between 1947 and 1958, in a neo-Romantic style that was to some extent a rejection of his father's avant-garde, atonal music. But the brief revival was a veneer over personal problems that had never gone away. He may have had bipolar disorder; he was rumored to have attempted suicide at least four times in his life, and at other times was prone to grandiose outbursts. He drank heavily beginning when he was as young as fifteen. (Alcohol abuse may have begun even earlier, as family friends reported that his father had sometimes given him a shot of cognac before concerts.) He grossly mismanaged his own career, continuing to rely on his child prodigy persona by putting his own juvenilia on recital programs. He also suffered financially from his father's mismanagement of his early career: because of a contract his father had signed when he first composed the piece in 1943, he had to pay royalties every time he played his own Piano Concerto No. 3 (also known as the Concerto de Québec), even when he played the 1947 revision. His breakdown in the 1950s was spectacularly public. His frequent drunken outbursts, frequently the subject of gossip columns in Montreal papers, caused his concert engagements to dwindle. From 1955 onward his only public performances were in "pianothons" in which he attempted to break endurance records; he was briefly in the Guinness Book of World Records for a continuous piano performance of more than 21 hours. He moved back in with his parents, spent the 1950s and 1960s in and out of rehabilitation for alcoholism, and died suddenly, most likely of cardiovascular disease, in 1968.
When Mathieu died, nothing he composed after 1948 had been published; though some had been performed, it existed only in hand-copied form. Some of his music returned to public awareness when his friend Vic Vogel was hired to compose music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Vogel made the ceremonial music somewhat of a tribute to Mathieu, basing most of it on melodies found in Mathieu's later unpublished works. Several concerts of Mathieu's orchestral and chamber music followed. But one piece was missing from the revival: Mathieu's fourth and last piano concerto, composed in 1948. This concerto was considered his greatest masterpiece, and he performed it numerous times between 1948 and 1955, but the score and parts were lost and for many years no recording was known to exist. But it turned out that Mathieu himself had made a recording of a 1950 concert performance and given the discs to a friend. In 2005, as pianist Alain Lefevre was on a concert tour aimed at reviving Mathieu's work, that friend met Lefevre backstage and gave him the recording. Lefevre and composer Gilles Bellemare reconstructed the score from the concert recording, and in 2013 Mathieu's fourth piano concerto was heard for the first time in almost 60 years.
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Allegro con fuoco