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Oscar Comettant: Prélude (F major)

454 views · Published 13 April 2015 · 2:22 · Indexed 21 October 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2015 · Music

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#11 from 'Heures d'harmonie', petites pièces pour piano (1874)
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The French pianist, composer and critic (Jean-Pierre) Oscar Comettant (1819-98) studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and wrote piano, chamber and vocal works.  He was best-known in his lifetime as a writer of books on music, and also his travels - he spent three years in the USA with his singer wife from 1852 to 1855 and visited Australia in 1888 as a juror at an international exhibition.  He was a keen observer of the piano industry, and famously estimated that in 1868 there were 20,000 people employed in piano teaching in Paris.  This piece comes from a collection of short pieces - each (in the French tradition) dedicated to a different Conservatoire professor or other friends.  This one is dedicated to the pianist and composer Élie-Miriam Delaborde (1839-1913), who was possibly Alkan's son,. Delaborde was an eccentric piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire, who once (per the Wikipedia article on him) kept two apes, one named after the pianist Isidor Philipp.  This piece is written in a somewhat ecclesiastical style (it could be a voluntary), but shows an Alkan-like quirkiness.  I should add that Comettant's compositional skills were not matched by his proofreading abilities, and this piece is so full of missing and ambiguous accidentals that any performer - like me - without access to the manuscript has to take a view on the composer's intentions in places!

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#frenchmusic #prelude 
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