Federico Mompou. À la recherche d’une musique perdue

10 × 19 cm 176 pages softback march 2021 retail price: 18.90 €

A senior civil servant, Jérôme Bastianelli is currently delegate director general at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris. A writer and music critic, with Actes Sud he has already written biographies of Felix Mendelssohn, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky and Georges Bizet. He has written a novel, La Vraie Vie de Vinteuil (Grasset, 2019).

À la recherche d’une musique perdue

FEDERICO MOMPOU

In search of lost music

Jérôme Bastianelli

Preface by Jean-François Heisser

Born in Barcelona in 1893, today Federico Mompou is considered one of the most atypical composers of the 20th century. Never adhering to any school, he patiently built up a body of work instantly recognizable due to its melodic generosity and its harmonic flavor, its nostalgia and its concision. To tell the story of this unusual artist, what was required was a form of writing as parsimonious as each of his pieces, an evocative biographical approach that maps the musician’s evolution, the birth of his aesthetic in his grandfather’s bell foundry, his love for the piano and for traditional Catalan song, his long journeys to Paris and his friendship with Villa-Lobos, Poulenc, Milhaud, Rubinstein and the Rothschilds, his madcap schemes to introduce iced chocolates into Spain and his late discovery of Saint John of the Cross, a mystic from whom he drew great inspiration to write his hushed tones, a music that falls silent lest it say too much. This work is a chance to discover a gentle and endearing personality who knew how to hide himself away and remain discreet despite being considered by some to be Debussy’s successor, while to others he was “Frederic II”, the heir of Chopin.