Charlotte Sohy Essentials

Born to a wealthy French industrialist, Charlotte Sohy’s precocious musical talent received encouragement from her mother, a keen amateur singer. Sohy was given a broad musical education, including music theory classes which she shared with the future great musical pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger. She also studied organ, and was inspired by the symphonic-style instrument she played to take up composition. Supported by her family, she studied with the very best musicians of that time—composition and counterpoint under Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel, while continuing her organ studies under Louis Vierne. In 1909, she married a fellow composer, and as a mother much of her time was taken up with her children and promoting her husband’s work. Yet in the year of her marriage, she composed a dramatic Piano Sonata, which shows the late-Romantic influence of her teacher d’Indy, though with hints of a more modern sensibility in some of its more daring dissonances. In other works, you may hear the more advanced style of Debussy, as in the luscious Thème varié for violin and orchestra of 1921, though again with a touch of late-Romantic wistfulness which recalls d’Indy’s composing colleague Chausson. It is a generous style, open to the influences of her time while remaining faithful to the expressive truth of her teacher. There is great power in her music, too: try the Symphony, composed in World War I during which her husband, wounded at Éparges, survived only after a near-death experience. Not only profoundly expressive, the Symphony also shows Sohy’s remarkable ear for orchestral color, making her fully worthy to stand with the great late-Romantic French composers she so admired.