ECHOES OF OBLIVION: Between August 2022 and May 2023, Robert McCarney's regular series featured little-known twentieth century classical composers.
PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS:
The late Patric Standford may have written these short pieces deliberately to provoke our feedback. If so, his success is reflected in the rich range of readers' comments appearing at the foot of most of the pages.
French composer Louis Théodore Gouvy was born on 3 July 1819 in Goffontaine on the Franco-Prussian border, and became divided between the two cultures of France and Germany. He studied music privately, as an adult, in Paris (where he made friends with Adolphe Adam) and Berlin.
Gouvy was the author of more than two hundred compositions, including nine symphonies, and his ambition was to become known as a French symphonist. Berlioz, Brahms, Carl Reinecke and Joseph Joachim thought highly of Gouvy's music. He became reasonably well-known during his lifetime (except in France, where they were more interested in opera), but became largely forgotten after his death on 21 April 1898, until being rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century.