1846–1925 · France · 20th century
Marie Jaëll (1846–1925) was a French pianist, composer and pedagogue, the wife of pianist Alfred Jaëll. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Henri Herz, and after her husband's death studied with Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck. She researched hand movement in piano playing and built her own teaching method. The site holds her songs at upper-intermediate and advanced levels.
Marie Jaëll came into the world on 17 August 1846 in the Alsatian village of Steinseltz, born into a family of landowners. Her father, Georges Trautmann, farmed the land and served as the village's mayor, while her mother, Christine Schopfer, had a fondness for the arts and, noticing her daughter's gift, took on arranging Marie's earliest concerts. Piano lessons started when Marie turned six, and a year later she was working in Stuttgart with the teachers F. B. Hamma and Ignaz Moscheles. Within a year of those lessons beginning, she was already performing in concert halls across Germany and Switzerland.
Ten-year-old Marie met the pianist and teacher Henri Herz at the Paris Conservatoire in 1856. She later became an official student of the Conservatoire, and just four months after that won the First Prize in piano. Her playing was noticed by the public and the local press: on 27 July 1862, the journal Revue et gazette musicale published a review praising her individual character, refined technique and exquisite taste. In these same years she began touring — nearly two hundred concerts across Germany, Switzerland, Alsace, Paris and England — and her fame as a child prodigy grew.
On 9 August 1866, twenty-year-old Marie became the wife of the Austrian concert pianist Alfred Jaëll. Touring together through Europe and as far as Russia, the couple built concert programmes out of favourite repertoire pieces, duets, solo numbers and works of their own; Schumann, Liszt and Beethoven were the composers closest to Marie's own playing. The pair also made a piano arrangement of Beethoven's march Marcia alla Turca, taken from his score for The Ruins of Athens, and saw it published to good effect in 1872. Visitors from across Paris gathered at the salon the couple ran in their apartment.
She gave several memorable concerts at which she performed the complete piano works of Liszt and Schumann's sonatas; she was also the first pianist to perform all of Beethoven's piano sonatas in Paris.
Alfred's fame and success helped Marie meet composers and performers they encountered on tour. In 1868 she met the composer and pianist Franz Liszt, who then introduced her to other leading musicians of the day — among them Johannes Brahms and Anton Rubinstein. By 1871 her own compositions had begun to be published. Between 1871 and 1900 she wrote numerous compositions and presented them at concerts of the Société Nationale de Paris, establishing herself in a circle of composers where men predominated.
Alfred Jaëll turned down the post of director of the Leipzig music school in order to go on a concert tour with his wife. After France's defeat in the war of 1870, when relations between France and Germany grew strained, Marie Jaëll applied for French citizenship. In 1882 Alfred Jaëll died of diabetes at the age of 49; Marie Jaëll was widowed at 35.
Her husband's death in 1882 opened the way for Marie Jaëll to work with Franz Liszt in Weimar and, in Paris, with Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck. In gratitude, Saint-Saëns put her name on the dedication of his First Piano Concerto and his Étude en forme de valse. It was Saint-Saëns, too, who brought her into the Société des compositeurs de musique, a distinction rarely open to a woman in that era; by 1887 she had been voted a full member there, proposed together with Fauré.
Tendonitis led Marie Jaëll to take up the study of neuroscience. The strain her hands endured in playing and performing pushed her to research how the body works at the piano; in her research she also turned to psychology. Dr Charles Féré, a physiologist at the Bicêtre hospital in Paris, assisted her in this work: together they studied how music connects mind and body and how that knowledge could be applied to teaching music. Liszt's music had a tremendous influence on Jaëll — she sought to understand his methods and playing techniques as deeply as possible, and this work led her to create her own teaching method.
What became known as the Jaëll Method took shape through years of trial and error, tried out on herself and on her pupils, aimed at giving each student a felt, physical bond with the keyboard. Out of that research grew eleven books on piano technique; teachers still lean on her method and writings today when they teach the hand. She drew her findings together in L'intelligence et le rythme dans les mouvements artistiques, a volume pianists and teachers still consult chiefly for what it says about hand position and playing technique.
Marie Jaëll died in Paris on 4 February 1925. She was buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris.
After her death her students continued to pass on her teaching, but as a composer she remained little known at the start of the 21st century. Her family gave Marie Jaëll's archive to the National and University Library of Strasbourg, where it can be freely consulted: it holds her published works and books, along with some unpublished manuscripts, portraits and photographs of her circle.
The reference work New Grove sums up her piano pieces and songs as rooted in Romanticism yet clearly open to the musical currents of her day, while American Record Guide placed her writing closer to the salon than to the concert platform. Four-hand playing was as familiar a part of her repertoire as solo playing: she took up four-hand and duet playing when she was just fourteen, and in later years she and her husband arranged and performed a good deal of the four-hand repertoire of their day. In total she wrote more than eighty works — concertos, piano pieces, chamber music, choral and vocal works; among them the symphonic poem Ossiane, based on poems by Jean Richepin and Victor Hugo, and the opera Runea. The idea for the piece Harmonies d'Alsace came to her from childhood memories.
Among her works are two piano concertos of her own: the First, in D minor, which she dedicated to Saint-Saëns (1877), and the Second, in C minor, dedicated to Eugen d'Albert (1884); she dedicated her Cello Concerto in F major to Jules Delsart (1882). Some of her piano pieces are aimed at an intermediate level of preparation — Impromptu, two Meditations, six Petits morceaux, ten Bagatelles, as well as the waltzes Valses Mélancoliques and Valses Mignonnes. Her choral work Psalm LXV, for choir in four parts, she dedicated to her husband, Alfred Jaëll; it remained unpublished.
The site holds ten of her songs for voice and piano. Two of them — À toi and En ramant — are at upper-intermediate level, and the remaining eight — Les petits oiseaux, Éternel amour, Causeries de vagues, Baisers perdus, Larmes, Le bonheur s’effeuille et passe, Les papillons and Quatre heures du matin — are at advanced level. One can start getting to know her music on the site with À toi and En ramant, then move on to the more demanding Les petits oiseaux, Éternel amour and Causeries de vagues.