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210 9 Marguerite Elie Samuel Champion of Good Taste I n the midst of the highly successful musical life of old New Orleans, it is perhaps surprising to read that some residents of the Crescent City considered the popular taste not to be as high as it should be. After all, for most of the nineteenth century New Orleans was the envy of all other American cities for its exquisite music. There were hundreds of opera performances each year, usually performed by excellent professionals from Paris and other French cities. Concerts were relatively frequent by local and international soloists. Yet there was always an undercurrent of discontent by those whose tastes went beyond the enjoyment of popular opera tunes. In Paris, too, there were challenges to the popularity of L’Opéra by those who preferred symphony and chamber music.1 At the end of the nineteenth century there appeared a brilliant pianist in New Orleans who became the leader of those who wanted more intimate music; her name was Marguerite Elie Samuel. Her struggle for the acceptance of what she regarded as the best classical music actually began in the 1860s. Marguerite Elie was born in New Orleans on May 17, 1847.2 Her father was the well-known local violinist Paul Adolphe Elie (1804–84), and her mother, Marie Waller (1826–1912), was apparently also a musician.3 She had a younger sister Louise (1850–1921), who is not known for any musical gifts.4 As a child Marguerite showed great talent on the piano and was especially noted for her abilities at improvisation. She made her debut in New Orleans on April 25, 1856.5 A few months later, when she was nine years old, her parents sent her to Paris to get further training in music. It was customary for children from New Orleans, both boys and girls, to go to France to complete their education, and Marguerite ’s immediate predecessors were Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69) and Ernest Guiraud (1837–92). She entered the Royal Conservatory of Music and Declamation where she studied under such men as Daniel-François-Esprit Auber , Gioachino Rossini, Ambroise Thomas, Fromenthal (Jacques) Halévy,6 and Marguerite Elie Samuel: Champion of Good Taste | 211 Victor Tasse. Her father’s contacts allowed her personal entrée also to Guiraud and Georges Bizet, who nurtured her career outside the conservatory, and to Camille Pleyel and his family, who introduced her to many of the most distinguished artists of Paris. Her piano playing must have been extraordinary, and when she was fifteen she played a Mendelssohn trio with Jean-Delphin Alard (1815–88), one of the most important French violinists of the century, a professor at the conservatory, and a senior chamber musician at the time. At one point in her studies at the conservatory she beat all her fellow students in a contest, winning both first and second prizes in front of an audience of three thousand. An anonymous writer described her as follows: “She had a marvelous gift of memory along with her brilliancy of execution and rare powers of expression and a touch of thistle down lightness.”7 When the Civil War broke out in 1861 and New Orleans was occupied by the Union Army the following year, Marguerite found it prudent to remain in Paris rather than return to the turmoil of her native city. Upon graduation from the conservatory, she continued her piano and other music studies in Paris with Camille-Marie Stamaty (1811–70, who had been Gottschalk’s teacher), Julius Schulhof (1825–98), Rossini, and Henri Herz (1803–88). Her public career in Paris included accompanying the celebrated violinist José Silvestre White in Ad. Blanc’s Sonata in A on January 11, 1864,8 and at the end of April that year she played in a concert by the best students of Stamaty in the salons Pleyel-Wolff.9 Just prior to leaving Paris she appeared in the third of a monumental series of piano concerts in Paris on September 6, 1865, performing numerous works by Stamaty, including his first and second book of four-hand etudes Les Concertantes with the composer on the other piano.10 After the war, when she was eighteen (winter season 1865–66), she returned to New Orleans for six months and performed in concerts before appreciative audiences. Her initial concert “just after her arrival from Paris” was a private one, “which satisfied the accomplished and experienced judges, who...

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