The Systematic Repression and Fictionalization of Joseph Bologne

There has been a fervent effort in recent years to establish equal treatment of all people. The effort has included the reestablishment of the contributions of BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) people throughout all time, but there is clearly much work to be done. Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, is somebody who, over the past 50 years or so, has been gaining considerable recognition as a strong musical force in the late 18th century. As we peer deeper into his contributions during his lifetime, we must ask ourselves how the question of his contributions ever even arose. How is it that somebody who was so important in the late classical era in France could be overlooked to this extent? Despite being one of the most influential composers and innovative violinists of the day, Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was under constant repression through racial and political prejudice, and his history thereafter was systematically delegitimized and nearly fictionalized. It is imperative to recognize this so that we may reverse the damage done to his name and establish his contributions to the Western musical canon.

Much of the firsthand knowledge we have of Bologne comes from a man by the name of Antoine Texier La Boëssière, Bologne’s fencing master, colleague, and friend, who wrote a book, Notice Historique (1818) (de Lerma 1976, 4). He is perhaps the first of many to give Bologne the recognition that he deserves (Banat 1990, 182). In Notice Historique he recalls Bologne’s light hearted character, and how “he had been at the point to ensure his fortune, but indolence and his lightness of character never allowed him to pursue the same goal for very long (La Boëssière 1818, 16, quoted in Banat 1990, 183). Joseph Bologne has been noted as a light and playful person with an extremely kind soul. He was the kind of person that would rise to the top in any field he wanted to, and in many ways he did just that. Bologne was a jack of all trades, and a master of all of them (Banat 2001). There is a wealth of writing about him as a skilled swordsman, possibly one of the greatest in France at the time. That being said, his heart seemed to lie with music. He was a virtuoso violinist, and an extremely accomplished composer. His musical repertoire that has survived consists of fourteen violin concertos, ten keyboard sonatas, eight symphonie concertantes, three sets of six string quartets, three sonatas for violin and keyboard, two symphonies, a sonata for harp and flute, several operas including the opera “The Anonymous Lover,” various songs, and arias from incomplete operas (Daniel, 23).

Why was it exactly that Bologne was hugely important? His music was fairly conventional, harmonically speaking. He wrote a good amount of music, but comparatively, he didn’t write that much and his musical legacy spans a relatively short period of time. It is clear that he was popular as a prolific fencer from a mass of records, and that he was a virtuoso violinist as many treatises have mentioned, but what were his contributions that were key to the Western music canon? One important element was the purely virtuosic nature of the violin parts in his violin concertos and symphonies. His music contained brilliant violin passages with a range higher than any music seen before, even that of Mozart. Bologne’s name is closely associated with the symphonie concertante, which was essentially the French form of the concerto. Banat mentions how the violin writing in his concertos and symphonies concertantes serves as a bridge between the violinist-composers of the late baroque (such as Tartini and Locatelli) and the technique of the nineteenth-century romantics (Banat 1990, 185). In Banat’s words, “Saint-Georges's particular virtuoso idiom leads directly to Beethoven and beyond, by-passing the violinistically more restrained style of the Mannheim school and the great Austrian masters of classicism” (Banat 1990, 190). As we saw previously, Beethoven was clearly a fan of that school. The Chevalier composed some of the earliest keyboard-violin sonatas, and he was among the very first French composers to write string quartets (Ledford 2019, 66). Bologne had even commissioned Haydn’s six famous Paris symphonies and conducted them (Daniel, 24). There is ample reasoning to put the Chevalier on the same playing field as Mozart and Haydn. There is, at the very least, enough reason to compare the Chevalier with composers who are better known than Saint-Georges such as Viotti, Spohr, or Rode, but whose work he predated and certainly influenced (Banat 1990, 192). Unfortunately, in today's study of Western music, he has suffered massive neglect and has been forgotten, at least until recently.

Many sources recall a famous story of the Chevalier being denied the position of director of the Paris Opera House due to his race. The story references three women in the opera house: Sophie Arnould, a leading soprano of the company, Miles Rosalie (another singer), and Guimard (a dancer), who, upon receiving news that the Chevalier had applied, petitioned the queen, saying that “their honor and the delicacy of their conscience prevented them from accepting orders from a mulatto” (Fetis, 1800, vol. 37, 317, quoted in de Lerma 1976, 8). There is some speculation that this was instigated and conspired by opposing applicants, however this has not been substantiated.

Other instances of racism and prejudice followed Bologne throughout his life and career. Gabriel Banat recalls another story of the Chevalier and his companion being nearly assassinated: “Saint-Georges and a companion were attacked on the street by six footpads, but they managed to escape with their lives, thanks to Saint-Georges's superior strength and skill. When the old Duke, his employer, urged the police to press its investigation against the perpetrators, the Duke was warned to desist because of the court's involvement in that incident. As it happened, the attackers belonged to the police; and their leader, Desbrunieres, was identified as a police official” (Banat 1990, 196). There is even an instance where Giovanni Mane Giornovichi, a friend of Bologne, attempted to pass off some of Bologne’s work as his own. This led to an intense fight between the two; however, Bologne refused to escalate the situation, having been the better man of the two (de Lerma 1976, 17). Later, when Bologne went on to fight in the French revolution, he rose through the ranks and became one of the only men of color to command his own platoon of soldiers. Even though he had gained the respect of so many people, there were still other commanders who thwarted his efforts at every opportunity, though. On multiple occasions Bologne was accused of being a counter-revolutionary and was jailed for this almost every time (Banat 1990, 205-206). Upon being released from his last jail sentence the regiment underwent serious changes. Men of color were removed from squads and forced to go to Saint Domingue to deal with a mutiny of slaves. Despite being a renowned general at this point, the Chevalier was no exception to this segregation (Banat 1990, 206). Clearly his life was riddled with prejudice and racism at almost every turn, and it only got worse as time went on after his death.

One of the greatest perpetrators of establishing misinformation of the Chevalier was by a “biographer” (more of a novelist) by the name of Roger de Beauvoir. In 1840 he wrote a novel called Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, in which he included numerous falsehoods regarding the Chevalier. Biographers thereafter were unfortunately greatly misled by essentially contradicting information and blatant romantic invention. If it weren’t for the fact that Saint-Georges was one of the most prolific European swordsmen of his day, these fictionalizations might have been the only stories we would have of him. Thankfully the fencing community from the time left thorough accounts of Bologne. Between military records, fencing records, and Boëssière’s Notice Historique, we were thankfully able to restore truth to his name and debunk the nonsense written by de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir was a racist and a royalist apologist who attempted to endow his own beliefs on Bologne in the novel. His book was an adventure-filled novel in four volumes which was dramatized and performed in Paris and London in the same year it was published (Banat 1990, 179). Among the numerous fabrications in this novel, “de Beauvoir proposes a totally far fetched notion when he suggests that the hero's mother named her child Saint-Georges after the name of a ship that ‘brought her people from their homeland’ and was at anchor in Guadeloupe at the time the child was born” (Banat 1990, 181). This is an absolutely ridiculous fabrication given the trauma that slaves ships must have given their victims. For the record, Bologne received his name and title from his father upon arrival in France. Beyond that, there are completely fictitious people in this novel including Bologne’s made up teacher, “Joseph Planton,” and fake stories of Bologne including one of him playing a piece as a child that hadn’t been composed until roughly 50 years later: Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata (Banat 1990, 181). It would take an entire article to break down the illegitimacy of his novel, but I digress.

This novel wouldn’t be an issue except for a few unfortunate facts. Firstly, upon publication, de Beauvoir confidently convinced the Duke of Fitz-James, to whom the novel is dedicated, of the “arduous and scholarly labors he expended researching his book” (Banat 1990, 180). Secondly, in a 1923 history treatise, a legitimate music historian by the name of Lionel de La Laurencie gave serious credence to many of the fantastical inventions in de Beauvoir’s novel. Lastly, if we take a step back into the 19th century, the novel and performative element of the stories of de Beauvoir made people truly question if this person ever existed. His story was whittled down to a complete misrepresentation of a royalist apologizing ladies man who even popped up into other fantasy novels such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (Banat 1990, 179). We should be somewhat grateful for the fact that roughly 80 years after that, La Laurencie was able to reestablish the Chevalier as a real person in late-18th-century France, but it is a bit worrisome that he accepted some of de Beauvoir’s ridiculous inventions as fact.

The reality of the current situation is that not many people know who Joseph Bologne is. Even people who are well versed in the Western classical music tradition may at best be able to recall some legend of the illusive “Black Mozart,” as if associating the name of Mozart is necessary to give credence and legitimacy to the Chevalier’s name. Thankfully, there have been active efforts by teachers, music historians, and musicians alike to establish Bologne’s contributions into the Western music canon, however there is clearly still much work to be done. We must focus on his aforementioned musical contributions, and we must recognize the lingering falsehoods regarding his legacy. Short of that, we risk losing one of the greatest composers and violinists from the classical era to prejudice and fictionalization.

Works Cited

Banat, Gabriel. “Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Man of Music and Gentleman-at-Arms: The Life and Times of an Eighteenth-Century Prodigy.” Black Music Research Journal 10:2 (Autumn, 1990), 177-212.

Banat, Gabriel. “Saint-Georges [Saint-George], Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, 2001.

Daniel, Marlon. “Shining Knight: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799).” Triangle of Mu Phi Epsilon (Fall 2020), 22-25.

Ledford, Julian. “Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George and the Problem with Black Mozart.” Journal of Black Studies 51:1 (2019), 60-82.

de Lerma, Dominique-René. “The Chevalier de Saint-Georges.” The Black Perspective in Music 4:1 (Spring, 1976), 3-21.

Southern, Eileen. “Black Composers Series. Vol. 1--Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Symphony No. 1 in G Major. String Quartet No. 1 in C Major.” The Musical Quarterly 61:2 (October 1975), 645-650.