Marie Bigot (1786 – 1820): Suite d’études
When the celebrated French pianist and composer, Marie Kiené Bigot de Morogues, began to complain of serious health issues in her early thirties, there were whispers throughout Paris that it was sadly inevitable: that women were physically and temperamentally suspect and not designed to take on demanding, masculine professions. The fact that Marie also wrote music was almost beyond the pale. As musicologist Freia Hoffmann has observed: “the gender character of women, as it was anchored in the thinking of her time, allowed artistic talents and – within limits – successes, but also took its toll on the woman’s body, which did not seem to be made for such ‘unfeminine’ efforts.” And yet Marie lived in an age teeming with sickly male musicians with a higher than usual mortality rate – somehow, they were not subject to the same inferences.
Things were no easier for Marie Bigot the composer. She was always diffident about having her works printed and some of her (unpublished) music has now been lost. One contemporary, writing just after her death, observed that “several works, the publication of which is forbidden by her modesty, attest that if she had devoted herself more particularly to this part of music, she could have produced works capable of being among the classics of the genre.” Marie’s surviving compositions do show the promise of something more. And she would prove an inspiration to another budding female composer, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, whom she taught as a child.
She was born Anne Marie Cathérine Kiené in the small city of Colmar in Alsace. Her first lessons were from her pianist mother, before she was sent to Zurich (where her father worked as a violin teacher and played in an orchestra) for further tuition. In 1804, she married the Breton nobleman, Paul Bigot de Morogues, a man more than 20 years her senior. The couple soon after relocated to Vienna where Paul had been appointed librarian to Count Andrey Razumovsky, a wealthy Russian diplomat, famous for being an important patron of Beethoven. Paul and Marie had their own comfortable apartment on the count’s magnificent estate, and as they mixed socially in his salon, they were soon meeting many of the elite musicians of the day. Marie became friends with both Beethoven and Salieri while at the same time impressing the elderly Joseph Haydn. When in 1805 she played a Haydn sonata for the latter, the old man embraced her afterwards, telling her enthusiastically, “Oh, my dear child, I did not write this music – it is you who have composed it!” He then inscribed on Marie’s music copy: “Joseph Haydn was deeply happy.”
Beethoven was equally impressed by Marie’s performing skills after he had thrust a rain-damaged manuscript of his newly composed Appassionata Sonata into her hands, although it is interesting how his reaction carried some echoes of Haydn’s: “that is not exactly the character I wanted to give this piece”, he told her after she’d played a few pages, “but go right on – if it is not wholly mine it is something better!” Clearly Marie Bigot had her own distinctive way of interpreting music – but perhaps too it was her own creative spirit wanting to make itself heard. One upshot of her inspired sight-reading was Beethoven presenting her with the Appassionata manuscript as a gift.
Beethoven seems to have been impressed by the young and beautiful Marie in other ways. One slightly clumsy attempt to spend some unchaperoned time with her would lead to a falling out with both Marie and Paul. The great man wrote to her, inviting her and her daughter out for a carriage ride, on the understanding that they would not tell her husband. Marie was embarrassed and Monsieur Bigot scandalized when he found out*. Following something of a confrontation, Beethoven wrote several long and confused letters to the couple, desperately pleading his innocence while also inferring some less than innocent feelings towards Madame Bigot. Whatever Beethoven’s intentions, the incident was enough to cause a cooling of relations between couple and composer.
*Beethoven may have already wound Paul up with frequent suggestive comments in his letters, such as “kiss your wife very often – I would not blame you for it!”
But if Marie had to reject Beethoven’s physical advances, she remained devoted to him in other ways. When veteran opera composer and music critic, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, passed by Vienna in the winter of 1809, Marie organised a private chamber concert for him, solely made up of Beethoven’s chamber music. Reichardt afterwards described to his wife “the virtuoso’s [Marie] excellent playing throughout the evening… she played five great sonatas by Beethoven masterfully… A small, rather select company around a round tea table enjoyed every note dearly.”
When the French army occupied Vienna during the summer of 1809, the Bigots decided to move back to Paris, where they established an influential salon. Marie continued to teach and perform, doing much to introduce Beethoven’s music to Parisian audiences as well as her own pupils, while Mozart and (the still not fashionable) JS Bach were staples of her repertoire. The Belgium music critic, François Joseph Fétis, the man who had done so much to champion the operatic career of Sophie Gail, would write of Bigot’s “exquisite sensitivity [that] made her enter with rare happiness into the spirit of any beautiful composition, provided her with accents of all kinds of expression and communicated herself to the nervous envelope of her fingers, gave her way of attacking the keyboard an indefinable charm of which only she had the secret at that time.” Fétis would credit Bigot’s playing with a kind of “perfection”, a view he felt was shared by contemporaries such as Cherubini, Dussek and Johann Baptist Cramer, all of whom became Marie’s personal friends. Other composers such as Ferdinand Hérold and Alexandre Boëly dedicated piano works to her.
Among her younger pupils were Franz Schubert, and the talented Mendelssohn siblings, Felix and his older sister Fanny, all passing through Paris at the time. Marie made such an impression on the Mendelssohn family that Fanny’s father Abraham was still consulting her for advice over his daughter’s piano playing several years later.
It was also during these later Parisian years that Marie further developed her own compositional skills, having taken lessons in counterpoint from Cherubini and Daniel Auber. Her surviving body of work is relatively slight and uneven in quality. While some of it is mannered in the conventional, late Classical idioms of the day, her best music has flashes of something altogether more dynamic. This is the woman, after all, who had taken so naturally to Beethoven’s ground-breaking (and distinctly anti-Classical) Appassionata Sonata.
Her Suite D’ Études is one of her later works, with Marie modestly publishing the set as pedagogic, technique-building pieces for students. The first two (in the above recording) are perhaps the best. The first is particularly brilliant, full of fast, whirling figurations, turbulent and dramatic, with hints of early Schumann: it is exactly the kind of piece which gives us an idea of Marie’s creative potential. The second is fleet-footed and graceful, but with plenty of light and shade. The Fourth is also worth a listen, starting off with deceptively simple, pastoral serenity before developing into something more complex. If Schubert or a young Chopin had written these pieces, they would surely have entered the standard repertory long ago.
But even as Marie’s reputation as a pianist and teacher remained high in Paris during these years, she suffered genuine hardships along the way. When her husband was asked to accompany Napoleon on his ill-fated Russian campaign as a personal interpreter, he ended up being captured by enemy forces and held as a prisoner of war for five years in Vilnius. Already showing the early signs of tuberculosis, the extra strain of this, alongside having to raise and support two young children without a father, may have helped worsen Marie’s health. The illness would eventually take her life in 1820, at the age of just 34.
Her husband Paul, eventually released in 1817, lived long into old age, surviving Marie by more than 30 years. He carefully looked after her manuscript copy of the Appassionata Sonata for the rest of his life and made sure it was passed into the safe hands of a trusted friend on his own deathbed. It eventually found its way to the library of the Paris Conservatory, where it rests today.
Suggestions for Further Listening
I would suggest two pieces in particular – the Piano Sonata which Marie wrote, and the Piano Sonata she would do so much to pioneer as performer (played here in electrifying fashion by Anna Fedorova).