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Charles Valentin Alkan: His Life and His Music. By William Alexander Eddie. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xi, 270 p. ISBN-10 1-84014-260-X; ISBN-13 978-1-84014-260-0. $99.95.] Music examples, bibliography, indexes.
Charles Valentin Alkan is one of the nineteenth century's most intractable musical enigmas. Despite notable contributions over the last thirty years by Ronald Smith (Alkan, 2 vols. [London: Kahn & Averill, 1976-87]; reprint, Alkan: The Man, The Music [London: Kahn & Averill, 2000]), Britta Schilling (Virtuose Klaviermusik des 19. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Charles Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) [Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1986]), and Brigitte François-Sappey (as editor of Charles Valentin Alkan [Paris: Fayard, 1991]), few musicians and even fewer musicologists consider Alkan to be a major figure in the French romantic musical movement. As an extraordinarily gifted pianist nurtured in the curriculum of the conservatoire, Alkan receded into the shadows of the Parisian musical scene as ostensibly more compelling characters like Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, and a host of other foreign virtuosos brought Parisian audiences to their feet. As a reclusive composer, he billed massive piano etudes as symphonies and solo concertos, issued character pieces with Satie-esque titles like "Fa" and "En rythme molossique," and set to music the sounds of the synagogue with a seriousness that not even Mahler dared try half a century later. More than Berlioz or Liszt, Alkan was the embodiment of the French romantic hero: lost, like Childe Harold, in self-analysis, withdrawn from his surroundings, moving in directions that yielded no tangible recognition. In this sense it is hardly surprising that the most enduring report about Alkan is the notice of his earthly departure in Le ménéstrel on 1 April 1888: "Alkan has just died. It was necessary for him to die in order to suspect his existence."
William Alexander Eddie, in Charles Valentin Alkan: His Life and His Music, attempts to bring Alkan and his music out of this historical purgatory and into the twenty-first-century musical arena. Through close but short analyses of virtually the whole of Alkan's output, Eddie portrays the artist as a "conservative radical" (p. x). The characterization is apt, for Alkan at times retreated into the past as much as his music adumbrated future compositional trends. The composer's nostalgia for the ancien régime, for instance, may have prompted...