Biography (read more)
Marcelle Meyer was born in Lille on 22 May 1897. She began the piano at five with her sister Germaine and entered the Conservatoire de Paris at fourteen, studying with Alfred Cortot and Marguerite Long and taking the Premier Prix at sixteen. She later worked with Ricardo Viñes on Ravel and the Spanish repertoire.
In 1917 she played in the premiere of Erik Satie’s ballet Parade, and became his preferred pianist. By the early 1920s she was performing for Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky, and she was closely associated with Francis Poulenc, with whom she also recorded. She was the pianist of Les Six, and appears in the well-known 1922 group portrait of the composers with Jean Cocteau. Among the works she gave first performances of were pieces by Arthur Honegger, Alexis Roland-Manuel and Igor Markevitch, and she gave recitals in England, the Netherlands and Germany.
She married the actor Pierre Bertin and later the Italian lawyer Carlo Di Vieto, and had two daughters. Meyer died on 17 November 1958, aged 61, of a heart attack suffered while playing at her sister’s apartment in Paris.
Meyer occupies two positions in French music that are rarely held by the same performer. She was the house pianist of the modernist avant-garde — Satie’s choice after Parade, the player Les Six turned to, a colleague of Poulenc, Milhaud and Stravinsky, and the first performer of works by Honegger, Roland-Manuel and Markevitch. Much of what is now the standard interwar French piano repertoire passed through her hands before it reached anyone else’s.
At the same time she was among the pioneers who re-established the older keyboard literature in France, doing a great deal to bring the music of Bach, Rameau, Couperin and Scarlatti back into currency there. That combination — the newest music and the oldest, played by one person as a single continuous tradition — is the substance of her influence.
Her recordings of that historical repertoire have kept her name alive well beyond the circle of composers she worked with, and remain the principal reason she is still listened to.
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