Thalberg, Sigismond (Fortuné François)

Thalberg, Sigismond (Fortuné François), celebrated Swiss-born pianist and composer; b. Pâquis, near Geneva, Jan. 8, 1812; d. Posillipo, near Naples, April 27, 1871. His parents were Joseph Thalberg of Frankfurt am Main and Fortunée Stein, also of Frankfurt am Main, but resident in Geneva. Thalberg, however, pretended to be the natural son of Count Moritz Dietrichstein and Baroness von Wetzlar, who took charge of his education. At age 10 he was sent to Vienna to prepare himself for a career as a diplomat; however, he also received instruction in music from Mittag, 1^stbassoonist in the orch. of the Court Opera; he subsequently studied piano with Hummel and theory with Sechter. He played as a precocious pianist in the aristocratic salons of Vienna, and began to compose. In 1830 he made a successful concert tour of England and Germany. After further training with J. Pixis and F. Kalkbrenner in Paris and with Moscheles in London, he returned to Paris in 1836 and set himself up as a serious rival to Liszt; the 2 eventually became friends, and Thalberg went on to pursue a brilliant career as a virtuoso, performing mostly his own works. In 1843 he married the widow of the painter Boucher. In 1855 he set out on a concert tour through Brazil and then visited the U.S. (1856); made a 2^nd Brazilian tour in 1863, and in 1864 retired to Naples. Thalberg was unexcelled as a performer of fashionable salon music and virtuoso studies. He possessed a wonderful legato, eliciting from Liszt the remark, ’Thalberg is the only artist who can play the violin on the keyboard/’ His technical specialty was to play a central melody with the thumb of either hand, surrounding it with brilliant arpeggios and arabesques. To present this technique graphically in notation, he made use of the method initiated by Francesco Pollini of writing piano music on 3 staves. He wrote 2 operas, Florinda (London, July 3, 1851) and Cristina di Suezia (Vienna, June 3, 1855), which were not successful, but his brilliant piano pieces were the rage of his day, easily eclipsing in popular favor those of Chopin, his close contemporary. Among them are a group of nocturnes, several Caprices, 2 Romances sans paroles, Grandes valses brillantes, Le Départ, varié en forme d’étude, Marche funèbre variée, Barcarole, Valse mélodique, Les Capricieuses, Tarentelle, Souvenir de Pest, La Cadence (very popular), Les Soirées de Pausilippe (6 albums), Célèbre Ballade, La Napolitaine, several sonatas, many pianistic studies, and fantasies on operas by Rossini, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Weber, Verdi, and others.

Bibliography

R. Lott, The American Concert Tours of Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, and S. T.(diss., City Univ. of N.Y., 1986).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire