1813–1888 · France · Romantic
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888) was a French virtuoso pianist and composer who lived in Paris for nearly all his life. During the 1830s and 1840s he ranked with Chopin and Liszt among the city's foremost pianists, then stepped away from the public for long stretches. Nearly all his music is for keyboard; the Op. 31 preludes are a convenient place for a player to begin.
Charles-Valentin Alkan was born in Paris on 30 November 1813, in the Marais quarter, to a Jewish family. His original surname was Morhange. His father, Alkan Morhange, earned his living as a private music teacher, gave his children their first lessons, and later ran a music school of his own in the Marais. The children, Charles-Valentin among them, took the father's first name as a surname and used it at the Conservatoire and throughout their careers.
Charles-Valentin had one older sister and four younger brothers, so he was the second of six. Music ran in the family. Napoléon taught solfège at the Conservatoire, Céleste sang, Ernest played the flute for a living, Maxim composed light pieces for the theatres of Paris, and the youngest brother, Gustave, published piano dances.
Alkan entered the Conservatoire at a very early age and studied piano and organ there. His teacher was Joseph Zimmerman, to whom the boy became a particular favourite. The first prize for solfège came when he was seven; prizes followed in piano (1824), harmony (1827, in Victor Dourlen's class) and organ (1834). When he was about seven and a half he first performed in public, not at the keyboard but on the violin, with an aria and variations by Pierre Rode.
In 1828, aged fourteen, Alkan wrote his Opus 1, piano variations on a Steibelt theme. Around then he began to teach at his father's school, where Antoine Marmontel was among his pupils; their relations later turned hostile. Alkan had been playing solo in well-known Paris salons from about 1826, and his father booked him into public concert halls. In 1827 he travelled to Brussels for concerts, an unusual journey abroad for him. At fifteen, in 1829, he was named professor of solfège, sharing the post with a colleague.
In 1831 Alkan enrolled in the organ class of François Benoist. It may have been Benoist who helped him appreciate the music of Bach: in France at that time Benoist was one of the few advocates of this composer.
Through the first years of the July Monarchy Alkan went on teaching and performing in public. His friends came to include Franz Liszt, George Sand and Victor Hugo. In 1832 he took the solo part at the Conservatoire in his first Concerto da camera, scored for piano with strings, and at nineteen he became a member of the Société Académique des Enfants d'Apollo, whose roster also listed Cherubini, Halévy and Liszt. He entered the competition for the Prix de Rome twice, in 1832 and 1834, and did not win; the cantatas he wrote for it were never published or performed.
Alkan's friendship with the Spanish musician Santiago Masarnau, begun in 1834, produced a long exchange of letters. He travelled to England and played recitals, and he went back in 1835. Also in 1835 he settled in a quiet spot at Piscop, near Paris, and finished the twelve caprices that were his first fully original piano works; they appeared in 1837 as Opp. 12, 13, 15 and 16. In January 1836 Liszt put his name forward for a professorship at the Geneva Conservatoire, but Alkan turned it down.
From 1837 Alkan made his home at the Square d'Orléans, Paris. Its residents included Chopin, Marie Taglioni, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand. He and Chopin were friends who often talked about music, among other things about a treatise on theory that Chopin was thinking of writing. By 1838, aged twenty-five, Alkan was at the height of his career, performing often, seeing more mature works into print and sharing platforms with Liszt and Chopin. On 3 March 1838, at a concert held at the piano maker Pape's, he joined Chopin, Zimmerman and Chopin's pupil Adolphe Gutmann to play Alkan's own arrangement, since lost, of two Beethoven Seventh Symphony movements for eight hands at two pianos.
Next came a six-year retreat into private study and composition, a time that overlapped with the birth and early years of his presumed illegitimate son Élie-Miriam Delaborde (1839–1913). Alkan never confirmed or denied that he was the father, though people around him evidently took it for granted. He gave the boy his first piano lessons, and Delaborde grew into a virtuoso pianist like Alkan.
Critics welcomed Alkan's reappearance on the concert stage in 1844 warmly, and Liszt, Chopin, Sand and Dumas were in the audience. The same year saw the publication of his étude Le chemin de fer. Over the next four years, to 1848, he wrote a run of virtuoso works, among them the sonata Op. 33, Les quatre âges, and the set of 25 Préludes (Op. 31) playable on piano or organ. A recital in 1848 left Meyerbeer so struck that he asked Alkan to make a piano version of the overture for his coming opera Le prophète. Meyerbeer listened to a four-hand version in 1849, played by Alkan with his brother Napoléon, and gave it his approval.
1848 brought Alkan a deep disappointment. When Zimmerman retired, the Conservatoire's director, Daniel Auber, gave the piano department to Marmontel. Alkan had badly wanted that position and had campaigned for it, backed by Sand, Dumas and other prominent friends. This may help explain why he became unwilling to appear in public. Chopin's death played a part too: in 1849 Chopin left Alkan his incomplete piano method for him to finish, and several of Chopin's pupils moved to Alkan's studio. After two concerts in 1853 he effectively dropped out of sight for about two decades.
The record of those years is thin. Besides composing, Alkan devoted himself to the Bible and the Talmud. Letters to the German composer Ferdinand Hiller indicate that he rendered into French the Old and New Testaments, the Talmud, the Torah, the Tanakh, the Psalter and a large body of classical writing. None of it has survived, and neither have many of his musical works, whose existence is nonetheless well attested: a symphony in B minor, string quartets, quintets, sextets and an opera in one act.
Even so, much of his most important piano music was published in that period. It includes the twelve minor-key études of Op. 39 (titled Douze études dans tous les tons mineurs), the Sonatine (Op. 61) and the Esquisses (Op. 63), the last two of 1861, and five books of Chants, issued from 1857 to 1872. He also wrote a cello and piano work, the Sonate de concert, Op. 47. In the early 1850s he took up the pedal piano (pédalier) in earnest, and first played it in public in 1852. From 1859 his publications began to carry the label for organ or pedal piano.
Alkan was raised in a devout Jewish home, and his grandfather Marix Morhange had printed the Talmud in Metz. The Paris Consistory treated him as an expert on Jewish music. In 1845 he assisted it in judging Samuel Naumbourg's musical gifts, after which Naumbourg became cantor of the city's main synagogue, and Alkan later added choral pieces to two of Naumbourg's books of synagogue music, published in 1847 and 1856. The Synagogue de Nazareth appointed him its organist in 1851, but he left that post almost at once.
Writers who have studied him depict an unusual man. Hugh Macdonald says he wore only black, in a stern, old-fashioned style, seldom went out, had few friends and felt nervous before an audience and worried pathologically about his health, although it was in fact good. Liszt, it is reported, called Alkan's technique the best he had met, yet noted that Alkan chose to live as a recluse. Alkan did not marry.
Later Alkan came back to Parisian audiences with small, chamber-style, half-private concerts that he called petits concerts. They took place in the Érard showrooms. The programmes carried his own pieces and works by the composers he loved, beginning with Bach, on piano and on pédalier, sometimes with a further instrumentalist or a singer taking part. His brothers and sisters helped him, as did Élie-Miriam Delaborde, Camille Saint-Saëns and Auguste Franchomme. They grew into a yearly series, though Alkan's health sometimes forced a pause.
Vincent d'Indy, then young, was one of those who heard him. He remembered Alkan at an Érard pedal piano performing Bach, and later Beethoven's Sonata Op. 110, and the experience left a deep mark on him.
Alkan's death came on 29 March 1888 in Paris, when he was 74. He was laid to rest on 1 April in the Jewish part of Montmartre Cemetery, close to the grave of Fromental Halévy. His manuscripts and large library either were destroyed by Alkan himself, as his will shows, or went missing after he died. Prizes he wished to endow at the Conservatoire and a gift to a Jewish charity were not accepted by the recipients.
Almost everything that survives of Alkan's output is for solo piano, though he also left chamber, pedal-piano, organ and ensemble pieces and a handful of symphonic, vocal and choral ones. His earliest original work, the Op. 1 variations, was written in 1828, when he was fourteen. By the later nineteenth century he counted as one of the great masters of Romantic piano playing. He kept to traditional forms but stretched them, just as he stretched keyboard technique: Op. 39, No. 8, the opening movement of his Concerto for solo piano, lasts nearly thirty minutes. The Symphony for solo piano (Nos. 4–7) belongs to the same Op. 39 set.
Alkan's music has a reputation for extraordinary difficulty. Some pieces call on players for speed, huge leaps, long runs of rapidly repeated notes and the control of contrapuntal lines set far apart. His two sets of studies, twelve in major keys (Op. 35) and twelve in minor keys (Op. 39), outdo even Liszt's Transcendental Studies in technical ingenuity. Critics think Le chemin de fer (1844) the earliest musical picture of a steam locomotive, and the Trois grandes études (1838) are for the left hand, for the right hand, and for both. Yet not everything he wrote is long or hard; plenty of the Op. 31 préludes and the Op. 63 Esquisses are short and easier to approach.
The 25 Préludes, Op. 31, were written for piano or organ. Some deal with Jewish subjects, for instance Prière and Ancienne mélodie de la synagogue, and the set is thought to be the first published art music to use Jewish themes on purpose. The site has the Prélude Op. 31, No. 1 and the Prélude Nr. 2, Op. 31, No. 2 (intermediate level), plus Chanson de la Folle au Bord de la Mer (Op. 31, No. 8) and the Toccatina, Op. 75 (advanced level). A sensible way into Alkan is in that order: the first two préludes, then the harder pieces.
Alkan made transcriptions as well: Mozart and Beethoven concertos and Haydn symphonies for solo piano, and passages from Handel's Messiah and Mozart's Don Giovanni for pedal piano. For close to a century his music was largely absent from pianists' repertoires, partly because it is so hard. In the later twentieth century Raymond Lewenthal and Bernard Ringeissen revived interest, and at the turn of the twenty-first century Jack Gibbons, Marc-André Hamelin, Yuri Favorin and Vincenzo Maltempo made Alkan a fixed part of their programmes.