Alkan [Morhange], (Charles-)Valentin

(b Paris, 30 Nov 1813; d Paris, 29 March 1888). French pianist and composer. His
real name was Morhange. He was one of the leading piano virtuosos of the 19th
century and one of its most unusual composers, remarkable in both technique and
imagination, yet largely ignored by his own and succeeding generations.

1. Life.

Of Jewish parentage, Alkan was the eldest of five brothers, all of whom, with an elder
sister as well, became musicians under the assumed name Alkan; Napoléon Alkan, the
third brother (1826–1910), taught solfège at the Paris Conservatoire for over 50 years.
Valentin Alkan’s career at the Conservatoire started brilliantly with a premier prix for
solfège at the age of seven. When Alkan was nine Cherubini observed that he was
‘astonishing for his age’ and described his ability on the piano as ‘extraordinary’. He
won a premier prix for piano in 1824, for harmony in 1827 and for organ in 1834. His
op.1 was published in 1828, when he was 14. As a child prodigy he enjoyed great
success, especially in the salon of the Princesse de la Moskova, although he later
admitted feeling eclipsed by the yet greater success of the young Liszt. His teachers
were Dourlen for harmony and P.-J. Zimmermann for the piano. Still on the crest of
his youthful success he visited London in 1833, according to Fétis, and was ‘cheerful,
outgoing and confident’ (Marmontel).

Alkan soon came under the spell of Chopin, whose close friendship he enjoyed and
whose music he much admired. He was friendly too with George Sand and others of
their circle. Yet there soon appeared the strain of shyness and misanthropy that was
later to become Alkan’s dominant characteristic. His life is undocumented for long
periods when he withdrew from the concert platform; his publications appeared only
at intervals; and he seems more and more to have avoided company. He held no
official appointments. From 1829 until 1836 he was a part-time teacher of solfège at
the Conservatoire, but he was never a full member of its staff. In 1848, on the death of
Zimmermann, there was public controversy as to whether Alkan or Marmontel should
succeed to the teaching post at the Conservatoire. The two men fell out when
Marmontel was appointed and Alkan remained without public office or honour.

Alkan’s concert appearances were rare, and he played more music by other composers
than his own works. After 1838 he disappeared from view until 1844 when he gave
two concerts for La France musicale, followed by two in 1845 in the Salle Erard. By
this time he had attracted the attention of leading critics, including Liszt, Schumann
and d’Ortigue, and he was definitely regarded as among the principal virtuosos of the
day. Yet he again withdrew until 1853, when he gave two concerts of ‘classical and
retrospective music’; this was followed by a further gap of 20 years until 1873, when
he began the series of ‘Petits concerts’, giving up to six concerts a year until 1880 in
both the Salle Erard and the Salle Pleyel. He continued to play at Erard’s twice a
week until his death, giving afternoon classes. His most eminent pupil was Elie-
Miriam Delaborde (b Paris, 8 Feb 1839; d Paris, 9 Dec 1913), generally thought to be
Alkan’s illegitimate son. Like his father, Delaborde favoured the pedal piano and was
a composer. But in contrast, his character was extroverted and urbane; he toured
widely as a virtuoso, painted a little and knew both Bizet and Manet well.
Alkan’s publications were nearly as intermittent as his concerts; there is an uncharted
gap in the 1860s, a period of his life of which virtually nothing is known. His works
were known, if at all, from publication rather than performance, which perhaps
accounts for the obscurity in which they have lain both during and since his lifetime.
It is fortunate that so many works, many of them of considerable dimensions, should
have been published at all.

Alkan’s enigmatic character, reflected in his music, has been well described by
Marmontel and de Bertha. He dressed in a severe, old-fashioned, somewhat clerical
manner, discouraged visitors and went out rarely. He felt he had lived beyond his
time. Niecks described how Alkan became warm-hearted and almost convivial once
the outer reserve had been penetrated. He had few friends, though he particularly
enjoyed the patronage of Russian aristocratic ladies, ‘des dames très parfumées et
froufroutantes’, as Isidore Philipp described them. He was nervous in public and
pathologically worried about his health, even though it was good. He remained a strict
member of the Jewish faith in which he had been brought up, and was widely read in
classical and biblical lore. This may account for the story, which seems to have no
basis of truth, that he died under a collapsed bookcase; de Bertha’s account of his
death mentions no such incident.
2. Alkan as pianist.

Accounts of Alkan’s playing are in accord on its virtuosity, although he only rarely
played his most difficult pieces. He performed the Symphonie from op.39, for
example, only once, and never played the complete Concerto (from the same set) or
the Grande sonate op.33. D’Ortigue in 1844 called his playing ‘firm, powerful,
brilliant and severe’, while the ‘Rover of Concerts’ (Revue et gazette musicale, xii,
1845, 139) said: ‘his playing is clear, pure, brilliant, perfectly controlled; but it lacks
breadth, passion, poetry or individuality, despite his claim to display these qualities in
his music’. He was proud of the strictness and precision of his playing, and was a
rigorous user of the metronome. His variations Le festin d’Esope are headed ‘senza
licenza quantunque’, and he insisted that Chopin, whom he greatly admired, should be
interpreted in a classical manner.

Alkan was particularly noted for his attachment to a wide repertory of historical music
and for his promulgation of music, such as the late Beethoven sonatas and Schubert’s
piano music, not fashionable at the time. He published transcriptions of Bach, Handel,
Marcello, Grétry and others, and composed in the ‘style ancien’ from time to time. He
was an ardent champion of the pédalier (the pedal piano), for which he wrote some
impressive works, especially near the end of his life.

3. Works and style.

Most of Alkan’s works are for the piano. Of the two early chamber concertos, the
second was later arranged by Alkan for solo piano. The orchestral symphony in B
minor, described by Léon Kreutzer in 1846, is lost. There are three substantial
chamber works and some miscellaneous vocal pieces of no special interest, save the
comical march on the death of a parrot for choir and woodwind. His earliest piano
compositions are variations and rondos wholly in the fashion of the day, many based
on popular operatic melodies, but without true marks of individuality. The
characteristic brilliance for which he was soon to be noted appears plainly in the
various sets of studies published in 1837 and 1838. In 1844 followed a group of works
that display his taste for unusual titles and subject matter, Le chemin de fer for
example, and the style is noticeably bolder and more original. In the next group the
scale is enormously enlarged with the 25 préludes op.31 in all the major and minor
keys (C major appears twice) in 1847 and the Grande sonate: Les quatre âges op.33
and the 12 études in all the major keys op.35 in 1848. The full conception was
realized in 1857 with the appearance of his most ambitious work, the 12 études in all
the minor keys, op.39; these comprise a four-movement symphony, a three-movement
concerto, a set of variations, an overture and three miscellaneous pieces, some of the
movements being of enormous length. Other collections show his fondness for
assembling many pieces into one folder, for example the five Recueils de chants
published between 1857 and about 1873, modelled in part on Mendelssohn’s Lieder
ohne Worte, and the 48 motifs or esquisses published in four books in 1861.

Alkan’s originality is evident in nearly all his music, but he was in debt to both old
and new music for elements of his style. His admiration for 18th-century Classics has
already been mentioned, and the more formal mannerisms of Bach and Handel are
plentiful. He was close in spirit, at least in his early music, to Zimmermann, Henri
Bertini, Kalkbrenner and the Parisian virtuoso school of the 1820s. Above all he felt
the influence of Chopin, whose ornamental phraseology he adopted, combining it
with a different melodic and harmonic style. The extra-musical element and his
recurrent boldness have invited comparison with Berlioz (who appears to have shown
no interest in Alkan). Schumann made the comparison in 1839, and so did Sorabji, in
1932, when he said that Alkan’s Sonatine op.61 sounded like Berlioz attempting to
compose a Beethoven sonata. But Alkan was altogether more puzzling and
impenetrable. His titles are obscure and elliptical, often with a satanic or mocking
tone. He revelled in Faustian ideas yet at other times assumed a childish, domestic
simplicity. Military motifs and quasi-religious tones, biblical or Hebraic, are also
common. Superscriptions and instructions abound.

A surprising aspect of Alkan’s style is its technical rigour, for he wrote not as a
pianist with a keyboard before him but with the cerebral exactness of someone for
whom the notation is more important than the sound. He refused to spell
enharmonically and facilitate reading, with the result that at least twice he was
compelled to use a notation for a triple sharp; he was scrupulous in his part-writing.
The same obstinacy is to be seen in his harmonic writing in which, for example, he
used pedal points or ostinatos against theoretically incompatible counterpoints; Fa
op.38 no.8 makes a special feature of this. His clashing harmony is nearly always the
result of one part’s refusing to move into line with another and the effect can be very
harsh. His playing without rubato was a kindred characteristic; indeed one of the 48
motifs (no.28) is entitled Inflexibilité.

At a period when the piano was undergoing universal exploitation for new and more
dazzling sonorities, Alkan made a positive contribution to virtuoso technique. His
music can be exacting beyond the capacity of any but the most powerful players in
technique, dynamic demands and stamina. It can also be disarmingly simple. He
exploited the extreme ends of the keyboard, often in deliberate contrast with the
middle range. Salut cendre du pauvre op.45 has fine side-drum effects, also found in
the powerful Mahlerian Le tambour bat aux champs op.50bis. Le grillon op.60bis
imitates the chirping of the cricket; Le chemin de fer, obviously, imitates a train.
Other instruments are imitated, for example the cello in La voix de l’instrument op.70
no.4, and a string quartet is evoked with remarkable precision in Début du quatuor,
no.31 of the 48 motifs. No.15 of the same set is a Tutti de concerto dans le genre
ancien in a heavy orchestral manner with a clearly differentiated entry for the
‘soloist’. The Concerto in op.39 takes this idea to extreme lengths with the orchestral
and solo elements in balance throughout. The fine opening of the Symphonie in the
same work has a real orchestral surge.

Alkan’s melodic gift was variable, rarely comparable to that of Chopin or Berlioz, and
sometimes critically weak. But he was master of a naive style as, for example, in the
maggiore section of the slow movement of the Symphonie or in Promenade sur l’eau,
no.6 of Les mois op.74. A piece such as the powerful Morituri te salutant, no.21 of the
48 motifs, achieves its effect entirely without recourse to melody in the normal sense.
His interest in unusual metres and rhythmic combinations was keen as can clearly be
seen in the second book of impromptus op.32: of the four pieces three are in quintuple
time and one is in septuple.

Alkan had unconventional ideas about tonal structure and was not bound by unity of
key in his larger forms. As early as 1832, in the first chamber concerto, the first
movement begins in A minor and concludes in E major and the last movement ends in
C major. The four movements of the Grande sonate op.33 not only get progressively
slower to illustrate increasing age (the first movement is a scherzo), but are all in
different keys. Both the Symphonie and the Concerto in op.39, being parts of a
scheme of 12 studies in all the minor keys, have all their movements in different keys.
In the second chamber concerto the three movements are continuous, with the third
returning to the material of the first. Alkan’s structures sometimes run to epic length;
the largest is the first movement of the Concerto, which lasts nearly 30 minutes. But
many of his pieces are no more than a dozen bars long. One of his favourite devices
was the stark juxtaposition of quite different elements, the best example of which is
Héraclite et Démocrite op.63 no.39.

Alkan’s music has been seriously neglected. Pianists have been slow to explore the
great range and variety of his music, not all of which is extravagantly difficult to play.
But he was greatly valued by Liszt, Busoni and many others, and should eventually
take his due place among the most important figures of his time.

Bibliography

FétisB

Grove5 (H. Searle)

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(1838), 169 only

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14

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