Hélène de Montgeroult

Hélène de Montgeroult, née de Nervo, was born into French nobility in 1764. Despite her brilliant keyboard playing and improvising, her social class did not permit her to be a professional musician. She performed frequently in Parisian salons, working with the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti and teaching the young pianist Johann Baptist Cramer. In 1784, she married Marquis André Marie Gautier de Montgeroult. Involved with moderate figures of the French Revolution, the couple were traveling with Hugues-Bernard Maret to his diplomatic post in Naples in 1793 when Austrian forces arrested the company and imprisoned them in Mantua. Here the Marquis died. After she returned to France, Montgeroult’s musicianship was deemed “useful” to the Revolution for patriotic celebrations. The story (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) goes that when brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she improvised such impressive variations on the Marseillaise that she was spared the guillotine. In 1795, Montgeroult became the first female piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire and published her first compositions. She created a piano method, Cours complet pour l'enseignement du fortpiano comprenant 114 études, her music’s engaging language sometimes foreshadowing that of Chopin. She died in 1836.