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Oscar Comettant: Sur la Néva

309 views · Published 15 April 2015 · 4:06 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2015 · Music

#7 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 piece - one of the longest in the set - is dedicated to the celebrated French pianist Francis Planté (1839-1934) whose electrical recording of an arrangement of Mephistopheles' Serenade by Berlioz - whom he knew personally - has to be the most authentic performance of that composer's music that I have ever heard! The Neva is the river that runs through St. Petersburg. The well-travelled Comettant probably went there at some time: the piece has a mildly Russian feel, with its central contrasting 'male chorus' section.

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Oscar Comettant: Sur la Néva

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