François Devienne
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
and professor for flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
at the Paris Conservatory
Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...
.
François Devienne was born in Joinville (Haute-Marne
Haute-Marne
Haute-Marne is a department in the northeast of France named after the Marne River.-History:Haute-Marne is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...
), as the youngest of fourteen children of a saddlemaker. After receiving his first musical training as a choirboy in his hometown, he was playing in various Parisian ensembles as soloist and orchestra player. He studied the flute with Félix Rault and in 1780 he joined the household of Cardinal de Rohan
Louis René Édouard, cardinal de Rohan
Louis René Édouard de Rohan known as the Cardinal de Rohan , prince de Rohan-Guéméné, was a French bishop of Strasbourg , politician, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, and cadet of the Rohan family...
. He was active in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
as a flautist, bassoonist and composer, and played bassoon
Bassoon
The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...
at the Paris Opera
Académie Royale de Musique
The Salle Le Peletier was the home of the Paris Opera from 1821 until the building was destroyed by fire in 1873. The theatre was designed and constructed by the architect François Debret on the site of the former Hôtel de Choiseul...
. He wrote successful operas in the 1790s, including Les visitandines (1792) which brought him much success.
He was also a member of the 'Military Band of the French Guard' where he was given the rank of sergeant with the duty of teaching the children of his colleagues in the military band in its Free School of Music. After the Revolutionary period, when Free School became the National Institute of Music, later chartered as the Paris Conservatory
Conservatoire de Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...
in 1795, François Devienne was appointed an administrator and flute professor. He wrote an important Flute School 'Méthode de Flûte Théorique et Pratique' (1793), which was reprinted several times and did much to improve the level of French wind music in the late 18th century. Like many other musicians, he joined the freemasons and 'Concerts de la Loge Olympique' orchestra.
Devienne died at a sanatorium in Charenton near Paris on September 5, 1803.
His output comprises c. 300 instrumental works that are mostly written for wind instrument
Wind instrument
A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator , in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into a mouthpiece set at the end of the resonator. The pitch of the vibration is determined by the length of the tube and by manual modifications of...
s. There are a dozen flute concerto
Concerto
A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
s, sinfonia
Sinfonia
Sinfonia is the Italian word for symphony. In English it most commonly refers to a 17th- or 18th-century orchestral piece used as an introduction, interlude, or postlude to an opera, oratorio, cantata, or suite...
s for woodwinds, quartets and trios for different ensembles, 12 opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
s, 5 bassoon concerto
Bassoon concerto
A bassoon concerto is a concerto for bassoon accompanied by a musical ensemble, typically orchestra. Like bassoon sonatas, bassoon concerti were relatively uncommon until the twentieth century, although there are quite a few bassoon concerti from the Classical period...
s, and 6 bassoon sonata
Sonata
Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...
s.
Devienne’s compositions for flute, revived by Jean-Pierre Rampal
Jean-Pierre Rampal
Jean-Pierre Louis Rampal was a French flautist. He has been personally "credited with returning to the flute the popularity as a solo classical instrument it had not held since the 18th century."-Early years:...
in the 1960s, are now better known to flautists, but still not to the public at large. As well as extensive educational work, including the well-known Méthode of 1794, with its extremely interesting articles on technique and style of the time, his collected work also includes eight books of sonatas for flute or bassoon, a variety of chamber music
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
and no less than seventeen concertos. The brilliant and melodic style of these last makes them perfect examples of the concertante classical genre, comparable only to work by the Viennese composer Franz-Anton Hoffmeister (1754- 1812), who himself wrote some 25 concertos for flute.
Devienne’s concertos, however, are, remarkably enough, frequently closer to the spirit of Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
, who while in Paris had attended the Concerts spirituels. It was there that Devienne frequently, and with great success, played his compositions, which were brilliant reflections of the elegant tone of Paris at the time. Concerto No. 2 in D major is an example of grace and balance, two characteristics to be found in the fine portrait of the composer by Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...
, qualities which are associated with Mozart, explaining why Devienne was called the French Mozart.
François Devienne is an ancestor of Tonino Devienne
.