Classical Hush Money

 

“Hérminie was right again” - Jacques Offenbach and Hérminie d’Alcain

 by Georg Predota 

Offenbach’s family

After Jacques Offenbach abruptly discontinued his studies at the Paris Conservatoire he gradually built a reputation composing for and performing in the fashionable salons of Paris. And at one of these cultured gatherings, his eyes fell upon a young Spanish woman by the name of Marie Manuela Hérminie d’Alcain. She was the daughter of the Carlist General José Maria Xavier d’Alcain Garro, who had been forced into French exile. The General died in 1828, and his wife Jeanne-Marie Céleste d’Alcain remarried Michael George Mitchell in 1835. Hérminie was barely 15 years of age but Jacques was determined to marry her. He dedicated a waltz to her in 1841, and a Romanze in 1843 as well. However, her family was not convinced that the young cellist was in any financial position to proposed marriage. As such, Michael George Mitchell arranged for a tour to England.

Offenbach’s leading ladies – Marie Garnier, Zulma Bouffar, Lea Silly, Rose Deschamps

Offenbach later reports to his librettist Emile Chevalet, “As you can imagine, music was played after dinner. I played my Musette, and the audience hammered on the table for at least five minutes and screamed “da capo,” so I was forced to repeat the piece.” A critic wrote, “Offenbach’s execution and taste excited both wonder and pleasure, the genius he exhibited amounting to absolute inspiration.” The highlight of the England tour was undoubtedly an invitation from Queen Victoria to perform at Windsor on 6 June 1844. The Illustrated London News reported, “Herr Jacques Offenbach, the astonishing violoncellist, performed on Thursday evening at Windsor before the Emperor of Russia, the King of Saxony, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert with great success.” Offenbach’s tour of England was a rousing professional and financial success. He returned to Paris full of confidence and in anticipation of his marriage to Hérminie, but there was a further obstacle. Her family demanded that Jacques convert to Roman Catholicism.

Offenbach and his son Auguste

And so it came to pass that Jacques Offenbach was baptized on 8 August 1844 in the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle. Comtesse Madeleine-Sophie Bertin de Vaux and Edme Ernest Foucher acted as sponsors, and only a couple of days later the couple wed at Saint-Roch on 14 August 1844. The blushing bride was 17 years old, and the bridegroom was 25. The newlywed couple quickly establish themselves in the social and artistic scene, and Hérminie becomes the catalyst for Jacques’ success. A friend reports, “Jacques was highly confident in musical matters, but he always listened to his wife’s advice. Not a single page of music was delivered which he had not played to her first. And although he defended himself in the rare cases that she declared something unworthy of him, the next day a new version was composed and presented to Madame Offenbach for inspection.”

Hortense Schneider

The union produced four daughters and a son Charles Ignace Auguste, who followed in his father’s compositional footsteps. Sadly, Auguste died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. The Offenbach household quickly becomes an important musical and intellectual center in Paris, and their “Friday Evenings” attract the composers Georges Bizet and Léo Delibes, the painters Edouard Detaille and Gustave Doré, the librettists Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy and the journalist Hippolyte de Villemessant. During summer holiday, the Offenbach salon annually moves to the “Villa Orphée” on the Normandy Coast. Throughout his life, Jacques continued his busy professional traveling schedule, and his favorite female interpreters often accompany him. It is claimed that he never had an affair with his favorite singer Hortense Schneider, but we do know that he had a dalliance with the 20-year old Zulma Bouffar, a relationship that produced 2 children. Nevertheless, his 36-year marriage to Hérminie was essentially happy, and after his death a friend reported that Hérminie “gave him courage, shared his ordeals and comforted him always with tenderness and devotion.”

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Pianistic Traditions and Contemporary Sensibility Gary Graffman and Yuja Wang

 by Georg Predota  August 29th, 2017

We all know that Yuja Wang was born in Beijing, but she is deliberately vague about her emergence as a prodigy. She always likes to tell interviewers that her mother wanted her to be a dancer, “but that she was lazy and chose the piano because she could sit down.” And she certainly had talent, performing publically by the age of six and always taking away first prize in any competition is entered. They called her a wunderkind, and when she entered the Beijing conservatory at age nine, “all the other kids were looking at me like I was another species in a zoo.” Her teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing eventually recommended that she continue her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She had always hoped to study with the eminent pedagogue Claude Frank, but when Yuja arrived for her audition, it was Gary Graffman who took her under his wing. Graffman recalls, “Wang’s technique was impressive, but it was the intelligence and good taste of her interpretations that distinguished her. She was remarkable among remarkable students. She didn’t play like a prodigy. She played like a finished artist.” Mind you, Yuja was only 14 years old at that time!  

Gary Graffman is not only known for passing on the treasures of a great pianistic tradition, but for opening the minds of his students to the significance of culture in our civilization. Coming as a young girl to Curtis, Yuja was quickly impressed by Graffman’s great knowledge about her own, Chinese culture. “He loves Chinese culture, and he is a big collector of Chinese art. He taught me a lot about Chinese history and culture. Even though he belongs to a very different generation, we had this wonderful relationship.” And she particularly enjoyed his style of teaching. “Artistically he would leave me lots of freedom and just loved it when I found something unexpected in the music. His face would light up and I loved getting that reaction. I ‘worked’ that out, and it inspired me to surprise him again.” Yuja is not shy in asserting, “Without him, my career would be nothing. He inspired me deeply and through him I was connected to the whole of the European classical music culture.”

Yuja Wang

 

Obscure Classical Instruments

 

Obscure Classical Instruments: Test Your Knowledge

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From the serinette to the tromba marina, explore rare and unusual instruments that shaped classical music. Take our interactive quiz today.

Martha Graham: Picasso of Dance

 by Georg Predota  February 14th, 2016

Recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Martha Graham created a movement language based upon the expressive capacity of the human body. Throughout a long and illustrious career, Graham created 181 dance compositions that crossed artistic boundaries and embraced every artistic genre. She collaborated, commissioned and served as an inspiration to leading visual artists, musicians, and designers of her day. This included the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and fashion designers Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, as well as composer Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti. The sharp, angular, and direct movements of her technique were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of the time. Her dance style “enlivened the body with raw and electric emotion.”

Graham developed the “cornerstone of American modern dance” with a strong belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses. “I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements… I wanted significant movement,” Graham explained. “I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.” Her revolutionary theories of movement emerged during her tenure at the Eastman School of Music. Graham believed that through spastic movements, trembling’s, and dramatic falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dances. She desired to evoke strong emotions and achieved visceral responses through the repetition of explicitly sexual and violently disjunctive movements. The fundamental movements of her unique technique are based on “contraction and subsequent release.” A cycle of contraction and release was developed as a stylized representation of breathing, and together with a “fall and recovery” cycle became one of the most important concepts in modern dance. In addition, Graham used her hands in distinctive ways, often placed in a stylized position with the fingers held straight and pulled towards the palm. Above all, hand gestures were meant to be active and purposeful, not decorative.

In 1926 she established the “Martha Graham Dance Company” to provide a platform for contemporary dance and to bring a distinctly American sensibility to the stage. “A dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root. No sooner does it fail to do this than it loses its integrity and significance,” Graham wrote in the 1937 essay A Platform for the American Dance. Grahams choreography was consistently infused with social, political, psychological themes, and in collaboration with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, they created a sparse and beautiful stage design that replaced flat backdrops with three-dimensional objects and the inclusion of sculptures. From 1926 to 1991, Martha Graham and her company created almost 200 dance theatre masterpieces, including the riveting Appalachian Spring with music by Aaron Copland. Her style of choreography was described, as “frequently the vividness and intensity of her purpose are so potent that on the rise of the curtain they strike like a blow, and in that moment one must decide whether he is for or against her. She boils down her moods and movements until they are devoid of all extraneous substances and are concentrated to the highest degree.” Martha Graham actively danced into her mid-70s, and her “continued experimentation and her constant attention to human emotion, frailty, and perseverance, is one of the greatest individual achievements in American cultural history.”

Lea Desandre (Born on July 17, 1993) From Ballet to Baroque

by Georg Predota  July 17th, 2026

Commended by the French government in 2020 for her significant contributions to the arts, the Franco-Italian mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre has established herself as a leading voice in early-music performance.

Desandre started her career as a ballet dancer, and to celebrate her birthday on 17 July, let us highlight her journey towards finding her artistic identity through singing.

Lea Desandre (photo by James Bort)   

Lea Desandre was born on 17 July 1993 in Paris to French and Italian parents, both of whom worked in the film industry. Her grandmother was a chorister at the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux, and Desandre started training in classical ballet as a child.

In fact, she would continue dancing until age 19, although by then she had already decided to pursue music. Desandre often describes dance as her first artistic language, and she credits it with instilling a strong work ethic and high standards in herself.

Lea Desandre (photo by Julien Benhamou)

At age 12, her middle school music teacher suggested she join the Paris Opera Children’s Choir. Despite initial rehearsals that she remembers as difficult, especially because she couldn’t yet read music, she was captivated by the world of sound.   

As a young chorister, Desandre participated in ensemble performances at the Opéra, and she became obsessed with the world of opera. “Thanks to my youth subscriptions,” she explains, “I went to every venue in Paris to immerse myself in music.”

She attended as many as three opera productions a week, being aware “that I was atypical compared to other teenagers; I was in my own little world.” Natalie Dessay became her first role model, and she began her studies with Sara Mingardo.

Her other teachers included Véronique Gens, Vivica Genaux, and Valérie Guillorit in Paris and Venice, with training emphasising the stylistic nuances of early music, including ornamentation and phrasing.   

In 2015, Desandre was selected for William Christie‘s “Le Jardin des Voix,” a prestigious programme dedicated to young singers specialising in historical performance practise. It is, therefore, no surprise that she considers working with Christie as one of the most important artistic influences in her career.

For Desandre, Christie was never a distant maestro figure but rather a mentor who shaped her understanding of style and musical rhetoric. Working with Christie opened up a very specific artistic world.

In intensely demanding rehearsals, they would focus on text clarity, dance-like rhythm, and the expressive freedom within Baroque phrasing. According to Desandre, Christie always encouraged her to bring personality and spontaneity to the music, and her ensemble work with “Les Arts Florissants” solidified her vocal foundation.   

Desandre participated in the Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, formerly known as the Mozart Academy, and made her professional debut as Médée in 2016. Just one year later, she made her debut at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and her international breakthrough took place at the Salzburg Festival in 2018.

Lea Desandre has established a prominent presence in concert and recital settings. As of 2025, she holds artist residencies at Germany’s Konzerthaus Dortmund and at Belgium’s Bozar in Brussels, presenting carefully curated programmes with Thomas Dunford and his ensemble Jupiter.

Songs of Passion (Erato Records)

Although her core repertoire retains a Baroque focus, her recordings have also included later Romantic pieces. In addition, she has participated in several notable collaborative recordings focused on expressive continuity across centuries.