Monsieur de Saint-Georges: Le Negre des Lumieres (review)

Monsieur de Saint-Georges: Le Nègre des Lumières, by Alain Guédé. Paris: Actes Sud, 1999. 316 pp. 149 FF.

Every year, the classical radio station of The Ohio State University (WOSU-FM) commemorates Martin Luther King's day with a standard program consisting of works by a handful of black composers. Pride of place invariably goes to William Grant Still who has come to been canonized as the dean of black classical music. Air time is also given to the works of other composers who have usually been represented by single works associated with their names. Thus, "The African Suite" by Fela Sowande (once described by a radio announcer as "a native chief from Nigeria") gets a hearing on this one occasion; it is instructive that neither this work nor any other composition by him can be heard on the station for another year.

The other composer who gets special attention on Martin Luther King's day is the Chevalier de Saint Georges, the eighteenth-century French mulatto who is the subject of this book. Alain Guédé provides a fascinating account of his career, from his birth in Guadeloupe, his early life in Saint Domingue, his various adventures as soldier and lover, and finally his rise to musical celebrity in Paris in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution. The strength of his reputation may be judged by the fact that, as Director of the leading orchestra in the French capital, he conducted the first performances of the series of late symphonies by Haydn known as the "Parisian," and was later appointed Director of the Opéra Royal by Louis XVI. His own compositions were held in such esteem that he was considered a rival of Mozart, although, curiously enough, there is no mention of him in any of Mozart's letters.

The music written by Monsieur de Saint Georges adheres to the strict classical style of his day and provides no indication whatsoever of an African ancestry or of what may be termed his tropical origins. (A CD of four concerti is available on Forlane, 16792). He wrote before the age of nationalism and felt no inclination to differentiate his music in any way. It is of interest to note, however, that he embraced the cause of the Revolution wholeheartedly when it came, forming in the turbulent years of its aftermath a regiment of black and mulatto soldiers committed to its defense. He was therefore not without a racial sentiment, for, as Alain Guédé points out, his experience at the Opéra Royal, where the refusal of some of the singers to take orders from him led to his resignation, may have had something to do with his revolutionary fervor. But the sub-title of the book indicates another determining factor, the hopes he had come to invest in the liberating ideals of the Enlightenment. Happily, for Monsieur de Saint Georges, the contradictions of this movement with regard to the condition of the African slave still lay in the future, after his death in 1796.

--F. Abiola Irele

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