Biography charles valentin alkan

Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and virtuoso pianist.
Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and virtuoso pianist.
Alkan was born in Paris on 30 November in 1813 as Charles-Valentin Morhange.

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Charles-Valentin Alkan (November 30, 1813 – March 29 1888) was a French composer and one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of his day. His compositions for solo piano include some of the most fiendishly difficult ever written, and performers who can master them are very few. His attachment to his Jewish background is displayed both in his life and his work as he strove to create his culture-bound values along with later universal values which combined his prodigious musical talent and his growing personal responsibilities to his spiritual and secular worlds.

Biography

Life and career

Alkan was born Charles-Valentin Morhange to a Jewish family in Paris, where his father lived as a music teacher. Charles-Valentin and his brothers, who were also musicians, used their father's first name, Alkan, as their last. Charles-Valentin Alkan spent his life in and around Paris. His only known excursions were a concert tour in England in 1833-1834, and a brief visit to Metz on family matters in the 1840s.

Alkan was a child prodigy. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of s

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New to The New Criterion?

The actual stuff and substance of his music . . . is of such startling oddity, such intensely personal and individual quality, shot through with an eerie, uncanny feeling that makes it of irresistible fascination.
—Kaikhosru Sorabji, Mi Contra Fa

For someone thought by Liszt to possess the greatest piano technique of the age and equally esteemed by Busoni as one of the great composers for the piano after Beethoven, Charles Valentin Alkan has certainly fallen on hard times. Even before his death on Holy Thursday, 1888, Alkan had fallen into the unremitting obscurity from which he is only now beginning to emerge. History is happenstance: it can be as harsh to an Alkan as it can be kind to a Satie.

Though apparently a warm, if somewhat shy, young man, Alkan developed into a notorious misanthrope and hermit in his later years. During his periods of seclusion he wrote much of his daunting and beautiful music while slowly shedding his early friendships with Hugo, Delacroix, Sand, Dumas, Liszt, and others in that glittering circle. Late in life, Alkan

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Charles-Valentin Alkan

French composer and pianist (1813–1888)

Charles-Valentin Alkan^{[n 1]}^{[n 2]} (French:[ʃaʁlvalɑ̃tɛ̃alkɑ̃]; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.

Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35