Exit Chaminade

In Monte Carlo last week death came to the most famous woman composer who ever lived. Frail, white-haired, 86-year-old Cecile Louise Stephanie Chaminade had been bedridden with a bone disease for more than a decade. Deprived of her royalties by the German occupation (her Jewish publishers in Paris had been liquidated), she died in comparative obscurity. The era that her fragile, saccharine little piano pieces (most famed: The Scarf Dance) represented had long since closed. Hers had been the age of rubber plants, stereoscopic views, and parlor trances over Ethelbert Kevin's The Rosary.

Born in Paris, Cecile Chaminade started composing as a child, dedicated her first works (a group of nocturnes and "slumber songs") to her pet dogs and cat. She took lessons in composition from Benjamin Godard. Always a facile melodist, Chaminade soon rolled up a list of over 550 compositions, which stand in the same relation to Frederic Chopin as strawberry soda does to cognac. Many of them (The Flatterer, Pas des Amphores, La Zingara, Valse Caprice, Air de Ballet, etc.) got an international reputation.

Beethoven's Flame. Famous exponents of Chaminade's music included Nellie Melba and John Philip Sousa, who liked to play the tiny piano pieces in full brass-band arrangements. At the height of Chaminade's vogue, in the early 1900s, her U.S. feminine admirers had formed more than 200 "Chaminade Clubs." Her Scarf Dance ended by selling over five million copies.

A fluttery little woman fond of long white gowns, Chaminade gave her recitals before banks of potted palms. She claimed that the soul of Beethoven once appeared outside her window in the form of a flame and burned briskly while she played the piano. In middle age she married a Marseilles music publisher named Carbonnel, who died five years later. A Philadelphia reviewer once mistakenly noted that she had never been married. "She is called Mme. Chaminade," he explained, "because she is wedded to her art."

Somewhat more measured was the 1908 impression of the New York Times's late, fastidious Richard Aldrich: "She has become a sort of tutelary saint of women's clubs, where her music is industriously studied, discussed, played and sung, and where, not altogether fortunately, it sets a sort of standard. . . . There are few composers whose music will not pall when an entire long program is made exclusively of it; and Mile. Chaminade is not one of these. . . . But apart from all this, Mile. Chaminade is an artist who can maintain a certain position of her own through her own powers and achievements. . . ."

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