“Barefoot without corset
moving augmentedly
improvising, composing at the piano,
time changing with tactlessness
A real Viennese!“
Paul Hille
But no kidding! Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was a French-Swiss, a Genevan with France as mother language. He was born in imperial Vienna and lived here the first ten years of his life. As a form year old he conducted standing behind Johann Strauss junior his compositions in Stadtpark and got predicted a brillant future as a musician by Strauss himself.
In Paris he studied composition and theory with Fauré, Delibes and Lussy. In his acting classes he got acquainted with the theory and some exercises of Delsarte. He continued his studies for two years in Vienna, where Bruckner did not like this „impudent Frenchman“ at all and threw him out of his class. Bruckner thought that a composer should not start to publish his compositions before forty-five years.
Jaques-jack-of-all-trades and his vita did not fit at all into this concept. With 35 he had already composed and performed „Sancho“ which became quickly „the“ French Swiss national opera. He toured together with violinist Eugène Isaye through the world. As theory and ear training teacher he developed his impertinent „ Rythmique“-„Eurhythmics“- Women without corsets, in easy clothes and-embarrassing -barefoot! executed his „Pas Jaques“ in order to make clear, to realize rhythm, totals space and form in a musico-plastic presentation.
When Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was 45 he had already toured with his students through most of the European countries as well as to America and Russia and German patron Wolf Dorn built for him a special academy and festival house, one of the first multi-functional buildings, embedded in the concept of the garden city for the employees of the „Deutsche Werkstätten“ Hellerau near Dresden. His friend Adolphe Appia realized there his groundbreaking ideas concerning set and light.
Then Dalcroze started to explore the value and impact of his method together with psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and other as he discovered that through his way of learning music students and children developed skills far beyond music education. During this time he composed unswervingly: more than 1.400 Songs, often combined with corporeal action in the classroom. Some of these songs became quickly „folksongs“ and one could hear: „C’est si bien d’aimer“, a love hymn to Swiss nature, even in France with a slightly adapted text.
During his life time he also composed 690 pieces for solo piano, many of those integrated in compilations. Some of these pieces were also meant to be „realized“, this means, the musical content such as double tempo, changing meters and so on, was shown in adequate movement and expressivity. Titles like „And the light displaced the darkness“, or: „Unquenched longing“.
Important works are:
- Skizzen op 10
- op 45,1-3
- op 46,1-3
- op 47,1-3
- 24 Rythmes des danse
- 16 Plastische Studien
- 20 Caprices et études rythmiques
- Musiques pour faire danser
- Trois entrées dansantes
- 6 Danses bigarrés