Biography (read more)
Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade was born on 8 August 1857 at Batignolles, then a village outside Paris, into a musical family, and had her first piano lessons from her mother. At about ten she was assessed by Félix Le Couppey of the Paris Conservatoire, who urged that she be enrolled; her father refused, thinking it improper for a girl of her class, but allowed her to study privately with Conservatoire teachers — piano with Le Couppey, violin with Martin Pierre Marsick, composition with Augustin Savard and Benjamin Godard. She had been writing pieces for her cats, dogs and dolls as a small child, and played her music for Bizet in 1869. In 1901 she married the Marseille music publisher Louis-Mathieu Carbonel on conditions she set herself — separate households, a platonic marriage — and did not remarry after his death in 1907. She died in Monte Carlo on 13 April 1944.
A salon concert in 1878 under Le Couppey’s auspices, made up entirely of her own works, set the pattern for the rest of her career: she performed only her own music. The Société nationale de musique programmed her in the 1870s and 1880s, she toured France, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland, debuted in England in 1892 and returned repeatedly, and in 1908 gave concerts in twelve American cities, where the Scarf Dance and the Ballet No. 1 sat on domestic piano stands everywhere. She wrote a Concertstück for piano and orchestra, the ballet Callirhoé and songs including “The Silver Ring” and “Ritournelle”; her Prélude for organ, Op. 78, was played at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901. She was honoured by the Académie Française in 1888 and 1892 and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1913, the first woman composer to receive it. Seven sides she cut in London in November 1901 are among the most sought-after of early piano recordings.
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