Marguerite Canal was born in 1890 in Toulouse. Her father was an engineer and amateur cellist, her mother was a pianist, and her brother a violinist. Her father supervised her musical training and helped develop her taste for literature, particularly poetry. She entered the Paris Conservatory at age eleven, won the first prize for fugue in 1915, and a prize for organ in 1916. It was suggested she embark on a career as a singer, but her passion for composition won out. In 1914, she competed for the Prix de Rome for composition, but lost. Her brother died the same year in World War I. In 1919 she competed again, winning Second Prize, and was named solfège teacher at the Conservatory. She won First Prize in 1920, becoming the second woman to receive the accolade, after Lili Boulanger. The manuscript and material for her cantata, Don Juan, are conserved at the French National Library. It was published in 1922 with piano accompaniment by Maxime Jamin, a cellist whom she had married in 1920. Her stay in Rome, which began in 1921, proved prolific, with several books of mélodies marking the beginnings of her vast output of this form: over eighty pieces in total. While there, she also composed her Sonate pour violon et piano, inaugurating her chamber music output – half a dozen pieces or so. While the Sonata evoked the love experienced by a young girl, her own marriage failed. As Maxime Jamin had published several of her works, she only retrieved the rights to these much later, following a lawsuit. In 1922, she returned to her post as solfège teacher at the Conservatory. Occupied by her teaching, she slowly stopped composing, and never finished the Requiem she had begun writing in Rome in memory of her brother, nor her opera Tlass Atka ou Le Pays blanc, on a libretto inspired by Jack London’s novel Burning Daylight.

– Florence Launay d’après Dominique Longuet –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]