Froidebise, Pierre (Jean Marie)
(b Ohey, province of Namur, 15 May 1914; d Liège, 28 Oct 1962). Belgian composer, organist and musicologist. He studied at the Namur Conservatory with Barbier and then at the Brussels Conservatory with Raymond Moulaert (composition) and Joseph Jongen (fugue). In 1939 he took the premier prix for organ, in Malengreau’s class, and two years later he won the Agniez Prize for composition. He continued his composition studies with Gilson and Absil, and was an organ pupil of Tournemire in Paris. In 1943 he won the Belgian second Prix de Rome with the cantata La navigation d’Ulysse. Appointed professor of harmony at the Liège Conservatory in 1947, he was also choirmaster at the Grand Séminaire and organist of St Jacques. He was an excellent teacher and had a strong influence on younger composers such as Pousseur and Boesmans; his many other activities, enthusiastically undertaken, enlivened the musical life of the city. Young performers and composers were brought together in his ‘Variation’ group (1950), and he passed on to them his keen interest in music from the 13th century to Webern. He was also concerned with reviving early organ music.
Like Souris, with whom he shared other qualities, Froidebise left a small body of works of consistently high calibre. A man of cultivated literary taste, he wrote admirable music for the theatre and the cinema, and his most important concert works – those which constitute his op.1 – were also based on texts. His earliest pieces for organ, however, show evidence of his Franckian training, and De l’aube à la nuit was composed in memory of Satie. There is more individuality in the abundantly melodic Violin Sonata. Absil’s influence is present in the harmonic and rhythmic explorations of the Trois poèmes japonais; its general feeling recalls Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics. Throughout his youth Froidebise was a great admirer of Stravinsky, as is most clear in the Cinq comptines, performed at the 1950 ISCM Festival. The discovery of Webern caused his music to move in a more sober and austere direction: in the cantata Amercoeur the disciplined construction of a text from Liège place names is matched by a severe and economical 12-note serial technique.
With the Stèle pour Sei Shonagon Froidebise broached aleatory music. Scored for soprano and four groups – quartets of strings, woodwinds and brass, and a percussion ensemble – the work is in three sections concluding with a postlude. Each section begins with a percussion prelude and then three vocal passages alternate with three instrumental passages. The latter alone are in measured time, but even so they are rhythmically extremely supple. The soprano has to improvise her rhythms in accordance with the text, her line surrounded by a radiant halo of instrumental sound. Stèle pour Sei Shonagon is Froidebise’s finest achievement, a work that handles 12-note serial technique without the frigidity of Amercoeur, subtle in its ever-changing sonorities and suggestive in its use of silence. In addition to his op.1, the radio operas La bergère et le ramoneur and La lune amère were notable successes.
WORKS
(selective list)
dramatic -
Radio ops: La bergère et le ramoneur, 1954; La lune amère, 1956
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Ballets: Le bal chez le voisin, ?1953; L’aube
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Incid music: Antigone (Sophocles), 1936; Oedipe roi (Sophocles), ?1946; Ce vieil Oedipe (A. Curvers), ?1946; Elkerlyc, 1949; Jan van Nude (M. Lambilliotte), 1951; Les choéphores (Aeschylus), 1954; Hippolyte (Euripides); La maison à deux portes (Calderón); Une ville chantait (J. de Coune); Le p’tit bateau de la réunion (J.M. Landier)
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Film scores: Visite à Picasso (P. Haesaerts), 1951, collab. Souris; Lumière des hommes (Bernhart), 1954
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Notre père, ?1934; La lumière endormie, cant., 1941; 3 poèmes japonais, op.1/1, S/T, orch, 1942; La navigation d’Ulysse, cant., 1943; 5 comptines, op.1/2, S/T, 11 insts, 1947; Amercoeur, op.1/3, S, 6 insts, 1948; La cloche engloutie, cant., 1956; Stèle pour Sei Shonagon, S, 19 insts, 1958; Ne recorderis; Poème chinois, S/T, pf
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Choral motets: Justorum animae, Laudate Dominum, Puer natus est
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7 croquis brefs, pf, 1934; De l’aube à la nuit, orch, 1934–7; Sonata, vn, pf, 1938; La légende de St Julien l’Hospitalier, orch, 1941; Hommage à Chopin, pf, 1947; Livre de ricercare, pf; Petite suite monodique, fl/cl; Petite suite, wind qnt
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Org: Suite brève, 1935; Diptyque, 1936; Prélude et fugue, 1936; Sonatina, 1939; Prélude et fughetta; Livre de noëls belges; 3 pièces; Hommage à J.S. Bach
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Principal publishers: CeBeDeM, Muraille
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Anthologie de la musique d’orgue des primitifs à la renaissance (Paris, 1958) [incl. essay and 3 discs]
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Bermudo: Oeuvres d’orgue, Orgue et liturgie, xlvii (Paris, 1960)
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Santa Maria: Oeuvres d’orgue, Orgue et liturgie, xlix (Paris, 1961)
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‘Sur quelques éditions de musique d’orgue ancienne’, La musique instrumentale de la renaissance (Paris, 1954), 277–88
‘Interprétation de la musique d’orgue et réalisation des gloses’, Le Baroque musical: Wégimont IV 1957, 255–9
with others: Encyclopédie de la musique, ed. F. Michel (Paris, 1961)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
R. Wangermée: La musique belge contemporaine (Brussels, 1959)
E. Senny: ‘Pierre Froidebise et le mouvement dodécaphonique liégeois’, Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique: Congrès XL: Liège 1968, 323–30
D. von Volborth-Danys: CeBeDeM and its affiliated Composers (Brussels, 1977–80), i, 130–22
L. Gendarme: ‘Le mouvement dodécaphoniste à Liège: souvenirs et réflexions d’un témoin’, Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, no.46 (1984), 1–10
R. Wangermée: André Souris et le complexe d’Orphée: entre surréalisme et musique sérielle (Liège, 1995)
HENRI VANHULST
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