The Chevalier de St. George

On 17 May 1779, our John Adams wrote the following in his … I never know if it’s spelled diary or diarrhea:

"Lee (American physician and diplomate Arthur Lee, who had come to France with Ben Franklin) gave Us an Account of St. George at Paris, a Molatto Man, Son of a former Governor (this is an error) of Guadeloupe, by a Negro Woman. ... He is the most accomplished Man in Europe in Riding, Running, Shooting, Fencing, Dancing, Musick. He will hit the Button, any Button on the Coat or Waistcoat of the greatest Masters. He will hit a Crown Piece in the Air with a Pistoll Ball.”’( Wikipedia March 2025)

This sketches the unbelievable abilities of this extraordinary Frenchman, who not only defeated the best fencers in the country - among whom the celebrated champion Alexandre Picard, who had been mocking him in public as “Boëssière's upstart mulatto” - but also made his career as one of the most celebrated violinists, conductors and composers of his time. The famous Italian violinist Antonio Lolli (whose father musicologist Aude Vaiselle calls Lolly-pop) brought two concertos with him when he came to Paris in 1764, which he dedicated to the 18-year old St. George, now made chevalier after his fencing victory over Picard in 1761. Two years later, the famous Walloon/French composer Gossec dedicated 6 string quartets to him. In 1769, the Parisian public was amazed to see Saint-Georges, well known for his fencing prowess, playing as a violinist in Gossec's new orchestra, Le Concert des Amateurs in the Hôtel de Soubise.

Saint-Georges's first composition Op. I, probably composed in 1770 or 1771, was a set of six string quartets, among the first in France, published by famed French publisher, composer, and teacher Antoine Bailleux. He was inspired by Haydn's earliest quartets, brought from Vienna by Baron Bagge. Also in 1770, Carl Stamitz dedicated his own set of six string quartets to Saint-Georges. By 1771, Gossec had appointed Saint-Georges as the concert master of the Concert des Amateurs. In 1772, Saint-Georges debuted as a soloist with that orchestra. He played his first two violin concertos, Op. II, with Gossec conducting. The concertos garnered a highly positive reception, and Saint-Georges, in particular, was said to be "appreciated not as much for his compositions as for his performances, enrapturing especially the feminine members of his audience” (this statement found in Prod’homme gives an indication of the direction this article is going to take).

In 1773, when Gossec took over the direction of the prestigious Concert Spirituel, he designated Saint-Georges as the new conductor of the Concert des Amateurs. After less than two years under Saint-George's' direction, the group was described by composer Jean-Benjamin de La Borde as "performing with great precision and delicate nuances", who also said it had become "the best orchestra for symphonies in Paris, and perhaps in all of Europe”. Saint-Georges was chosen as the dedicatee of another composition in 1778, violinist Giovanni Avoglio's set of string quartets, Op. 6.

From 5 July to 11 September 1778, Saint-Georges lived at the residence of the German born journalist, diplomat and encyclopedist Baron von Grimm on the Chaussée d'Antin just as did Mozart who moved in after his mother died; both left in September. The Duc d'Orléans appointed Saint-Georges as Lieutenant de la chasse of his vast hunting grounds at Raincy, with an additional salary of 2000 livres a year. "Saint-Georges the mulatto so strong, so adroit, was one of the hunters…”

St. George seems to have befriended  composers Grétry, Salieri, and Gluck, no small boys either, even though I can’t stand most of Salieri’s music.

In 1790, Chevalier de St. Georges decided to go into the army to serve the new Revolution. There, politics, to a certain extent comprising his race, got in the way. It was very hard for an individual who survived the Reign of Terror to avoid suspicion for an ‘untoward’ political position, whatever that was, as the successions of power were so numerous and swift. Chevalier, banned from the army, spent his last years still bringing orchestras together and giving concerts. He died three years before Napoleon took office as First Consul, in which slavery was reinstalled and works by colored people forbidden. No one is safe from collective stupidity, envy and bigotry, and I am not only talking race here.

I think this suffices to show what a truly extraordinary man this chevalier was. Those who want to know more of the him will doubtlessly find plenty of material to choose from in this age where in intellectual circles the ideology of diversity is still shoved down our throats. It is not this remarkable man, but today’s attitude toward him, and the way he, too, is being used as a pawn in a political game most of us don’t even know we are playing, that I have chosen as subject of this article.

I have always been a keen reader of history. It was the research during the creation of a musical about Martin Luther I collaborated on with my then girlfriend/fiancée Jeannette Aimée around 1995, that first confronted me with bias and the distortion of history, in this case committed by two rival denominations that each claimed to have a monopoly on truth. The Protestant biographies were nothing but praise, the Roman Catholic ones painted a different picture. Whenever Christianity is involved in a historical study, such as the authorship of the Books of Moses or the historicity of the Exodus and Conquest, propaganda is ubiquitous. Just like those Christians who have embraced the a priori position that the Bible is inerrant, which ideology forces them to find evidence supporting their à priori formed concepts, rather than to open-mindedly investigate, we have now developed a prejudiced ideology based on race and gender that shall not be challenged. The material I have read recently about Artemisia Gentileschi (my favorite painter), has made me very aware of how this viewpoint colors and distorts our opinions and even our research, just like perspective distorts the forms of the objects to make them fit how we see them, not how they are. In Artemisia’s case, it strikes me how, once her subject is chosen and her energy tank fueled, perhaps and even probably by her tragic rape, she goes way beyond that particular personal experience and shows man and woman in their highest glory, and her ability to do so is what makes one of the greatest artists of western history.

Chevalier’s compositions disappoint me. This is not surprising in itself; most great virtuosi were not such great composers (with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven among the exceptions), and the vast majority especially of our major string repertoire was written by organists and pianists (as the three exceptions mentioned above all were). Certain great composers were not the greatest performers either: Brahms’ playing, according to David Popper’s testimony (Popper’s own music sounds quite good, by the way) was ‘very loud and not very accurate’, which can perhaps, conceivably, be concluded from the one very primitive and noise-drowned recording of his playing made in the 1880s. Obviously, among the many talents our French Olympic sportsman, musician and military man possessed - composing was not one of them. I find his music beautiful - as opposed to for instance Salieri’s - but cliché, predictable, limited, not very imaginative (except when he can shine in certain special fiddle techniques), and the flow sometimes leaves to be desired. From his music I derive - or think I do -  that Chevalier must not only have been an excellent player but also a real musician who played with soul; but he did not have the ‘all-round, universal overview’ needed for a good creation. And since I do not wish to criticize this valuable scion of European music history any further, I’ll leave it at that. It is not the Chevalier, who would have played circles around me, I have an issue with - it is the bias in our world, in my artistic circles, where I can’t seem to stop hearing over and over again that Chevalier de St. Georges was not played because he was black, which I then hear supported by some mention of a few unfortunate racist laws or directives and other quotations from the rich repertoire of racist utterances in European and American history. But a mandate by Napoleon which perhaps lasted 13 years (interesting how rarely we hear when racist regulations end!) is not the reason Chevalier was not played in the 2 centuries since. The claim that St. Georges was not played for 2 centuries because of his race is the exact opposite of the truth. There are dozens of great performers from the 18th and 19th century whose music we do not or rarely play any more, and who were all white. We don’t play them any more because their music, like Chevalier’s, fails to impress.  The only reason we now play Chevalier today, rather than all those others, is because he was black. Who then are the racists in this scenario? When we call Chevalier ‘the black Mozart’, I think we do a great disservice to both men. As a player, Chevalier may have been more than the younger Mozart’s match when playing sonatas and duos together. Chevalier may have been the better conductor (especially when Mozart decided to leave his podium and push away the celesta player to start improvising to tease Schikaneder, the librettist in his double role as performer singing Papageno). Qua composer, however, the Frenchman couldn’t hold a candle to his younger German  colleague, whose music at age 12 was already better than anything the man from Guadeloupe would ever compose. Pretending that Chevalier’s music is among the great classics is much more damaging to the arts, or even to our whole civilization, than we may suspect. Since it is by knowledge, that is, aſſeſſment of reality, that our species survives, every lie is a potential danger to our very existence. Besides, in view of the ever dwindling audiences in claſſical music, if we start programming mediocre music for political reasons, who will then be coming to our concerts? Reading one page of Jane Austen shows how outdated the forms of communication used in her era are to us today, and how little they allow us to express of what we want to express. If it were not for the timeless quality that makes her books, among many other things, the greatest romance novels every written, why would we be interested in these stuffy ancient people with their stilted manners? Those strained conventions are exactly what Mozart’s music consists of (Austen’s characters were not yet ready for what Beethoven was writing in their days), and if it weren’t for Mozart’s ageless, lasting genius, why wouldn’t we dash out of the concert hall to join our friends in the bar with a jazz trio playing Sophisticated Lady? There is little in Chevalier’s music that goes beyond a mere reminiscence of the extraordinary man he was, and even I prefer Taylor soon-to-be Kelce - and certainly or Mahomes passing to Kelce -  to the concert hall if that were the music played there.

Art is profound. It engages us in the depths of our souls. Even if some people don’t seem to want to be aware, every human is an infinite cosmos of emotional and spiritual subconscious desires, yearnings, projections, oxymorons. Together with nature, (real) erotics, poetry and meditation, art is one of the few major activities that speak to us in the fullest sense, down to these deepest realms of our souls, far beyond reason and logic. This is why we all agree that art is so important in the schools, disagreeing with the “restrictive”, “pedestrian”, ‘simple-minded’ administrators whose limited opinions fail to discern the significance and importance of these subjects that usually do not bring in a steady income. But we seem to have no problem placing politics above art whenever we like the political ideas. The idea of putting Beethoven second to Bill Gates we find horrible, but Beethoven second to a black composer from the ghetto doesn’t seem to bother us. We say the nazis destroyed music when they played German composers at the cost of Jews and Russians, but we don’t seem to be aware how we destroy classical music by letting our college kids play predominantly black, gay and women composers instead of our culture’s greatest works, works our kids can spend a lifetime discovering, starting right there in the schools. Many of my colleagues today, professionals younger than I, don’t even seem to grasp that their advocacy for the importance of who wrote a piece of music brings them right in the same camp with Hitler and cronies who shunned (a very Lutheran) Mendelssohn because he was of Jewish ancestry.

Programming mediocre music because of who wrote it would be the same as feeding us McDonalds because it would be ‘patriotic’, or banning all haute couture and haute cuisine because it is French.

Besides, what is even African about Chevalier’s music? The music he writes - as far as I played it - is as ‘white' as Beethoven’s. If you want to play black music, play Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane; invite a Gospel choir, or a drummer from Senegal. African singing is one of my favorite things to listen to.

Art engages us on our deepest levels. Politics, however indispensable, are limited to finding ways to allow all those infinitely more or less profound souls to live together. C.S. Lewis’ purpose for government, to make sure you can read the newspaper on your Sunday morning in peace and quiet, seems to lose steam with the majority of people, but I agree with him. Politics does not have the right to decide for us what values to seek and what inspires us, what we live for. That’s between me and God. When art is made subject to politics, when politics decide which art should be enjoyed, we have what an Italian conductor used to call La morta della musica (for which often repeated pet line I began to call him Mortadella). In a time where politics has again taken the direction of placing the individual at the service of some group-ideal (the return of totalitarianism), we need the arts more than ever.

Let us be objective. Let is admire this remarkable man for what he was, not an African Mozart, but a man who could do almost anything superbly - except composing music. And let us play and sing music, not because it was by black, female or gay, or Dutch, or short or bald or handicapped composers, but because the music itself talks to us and inspires us.