Joseph Bologne
A supreme sportsman with military ambitions, Bologne was also one of the finest musicians of 18th-century Paris. Paul Riley tells his story
What is it about the exploits of titled composers that courts notoriety? Think of the Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza (better known as Gesualdo), whose harmonically tortured music neatly counterpoints his fame as a double murderer. Or more benignly, how about the eccentric Lord Berners, who dyed his pigeons all the colours of the rainbow and motored around in a Rolls-royce boasting its own customised clavichord? When it comes to jaw-dropping extra-musical acclaim, however, there is no one to touch Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-georges.
The spelling of his name and the year of his birth might be open to dispute, but there’s no debating that he was a man of many talents, and outstanding in all of them. In the age of social media he’d have been a natural as an ‘influencer’; in prerevolutionary Paris his influence cut deep.
Born in Guadeloupe to a French colonial plantation owner and his mistress, a young Senegalese slave, Joseph was taken to Paris at an early age to acquire the education of a gentleman. Enrolled at Boëssière’s celebrated Académie royale polytechnique des armes et de l’équitation, his fencing skills earned him the soubriquet ‘the god of arms’; and when he subsequently bested Alexandre Picard, one of the foremost fencers in all France, the victory was doubly sweet since the Exhibition had inevitably pitted supporters and opponents of slavery against each other. When he graduated in 1766, Joseph was appointed a Gendarme du Roi (a member of the King’s bodyguard) and, following in his father’s footsteps, he assumed the style Chevalier de Saint-georges – a title he could never have inherited because of the strict inheritance laws applied to the son of a slave. And with his prowess as runner, skater, crack shot and excellent rider, not to mention his party piece of swimming across the Seine with one hand tied behind his back, a glittering career in the military might have been predicted.
Bubbling away in the background however, a different path was beckoning. Whether Joseph had received any musical tuition in Guadeloupe is open
When it comes to jaw-dropping extra-musical acclaim, there is no one to touch Bologne
to speculation, but music was certainly part of the curriculum for any aspiring gentleman. The 19th-century writer Fétis suggested that the great Jean-marie Leclair might have had a hand in developing the young man’s violin technique, and it seems likely that the composer-impresario François-joseph Gossec pointed him in the direction of composing. Whatever the case, Gossec was certainly to prove influential. And Joseph must have been a fast learner. Two years before his graduation from the fencing academy, Antonio Lotti had written a couple of violin concertos for him; Gossec dedicated a set of string trios in 1766; and in 1768 Le Mercure de France published an effusively laudatory poem describing the youthful Bologne as a ‘child of genius’, ‘a rival to the god of harmony’ who would be ‘taken for Apollo should he join his music to