Chevalier de saint-georges biography of michael

Home / Celebrity Biographies / Chevalier de saint-georges biography of michael

Whether this is your first encounter with the 18th Century superstar violinist/composer/athlete or you're a longtime fan, there's always more to learn and celebrate.

Well, it turns out that the "Le Noir" appended to his name, which had led researchers to conclude that he was Black, actually referred not to him, but to the color of his horse! Chevalier de Saint-George was also a renowned fencer, abolitionist, supporter of the French Revolution, and colonel of the famous Légion Saint-Georges, an all-black military regiment. 

John Adams, a founding father and second president of the U.S., described him as “the most accomplished Man in Europe in Riding, Running, Shooting, Fencing, Dancing, Musick” in a 1779 diary entry.  

As the Schomburg Center honors Black Music Month, June is a wonderful time to schedule a research appointment to explore materials in person and view items online about Chevalier de Saint-Georges—a man history almost erased.

A popular theory suggests that the Austrian not only copied ideas from Chevalier’s work but also allowed his jealousy to fuel the creation of the despicable black character Monostatos, who appeared in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.

Was there a petition protesting Bologne's appointment as director of the Paris Opera, thus preventing him from getting the job?

Yes, there was a public and apparently complicated petition (probably not just concerning his skin color, but also complex political issues internal to the opera) that resulted in him withdrawing his name from the directorship.

Did Bologne hate Gluck?

Unlikely.

I hope that the links below will spark many hours of exploration and enjoyment!

My first encounter with Bologne was way back in 1997.

Crossing my fingers that Bologne's music was as great as his portrait, I studied almost ten of his violin concertos to choose my favorite.

PLAYING BOLOGNE'S MUSIC

Over the years since I first learned his concertos, I've really enjoyed exploring Bologne's sinfonias concertantes, a genre that he helped pioneer.

Bologne is also one of the 40 composers featured in The RBP Foundation Coloring Book of Black Composers.

After promotion to soloist within Le Concert des Amateurs, Chevalier eventually became its conductor.

Each violin part has an assigned role, with most of the melodic and virtuosic material being played by Violin 1, accompanied by Violin 2. He then adopted the suffix of his father’s plantation and became Chevalier de Saint-Georges. And if you've already signed up, please invite your friends! Be sure to check out this fun video of Augustin Hadelich playing both parts of Sonata No.

3! Information about modern editions of many of these works can be found in the repertoire directories of my RBP Foundation's Music by Black Composers project (which you can find here). Whoa! Those latter are each in two movements, with the first in sonata-allegro form and the second a theme and variations. So for Chevalier to often be remembered as ‘Le Mozart Noir’ (‘The Black Mozart) is rather unfair and some argue it is Mozart who should be known as ‘The White Chevalier’.

However, in the case of the orchestral works, this means that there is no conductor score, measure numbers, or corrections of misprints.

Whilst it’s unknown whether the two men ever met, they were in Paris at the same time and undoubtedly knew of each other’s work.

Having grown up enjoying the interplay between the parts of such duos as those by Viotti and Pleyel, I've experimented with rearranging the parts to trade off phrases.

Relationship with royalty

Chevalier’s musical talents had not only caught the eye of the French public but also of the royal family. Chevalier’s mother was one of Bologne’s housemaids, a teenage Senegalese girl called Anne Nanon. Awesome album cover alert!