Marguerite Béclard was born in Paris in 1884, the third child of Marie-Louise Simonard and Jules Béclard, dean of the faculty of medicine. She studied at the Schola Cantorum de Paris: the organ under Abel Decaux, and composition under Vincent d’Indy. She also studied counterpoint under Maurice Emmanuel, who helped grow her interest in the music of ancient Greece and in popular music. In 1908, she married Raoul d’Harcourt, and followed him to Peru where he was posted for business affairs in 1912. They travelled there again in 1919, and in 1925 they published a pioneering work of ethnomusicology: La Musique des Incas et ses survivances. In 1956, they also published a book on the French folk songs of Canada, and studied the French folk songs of Louisiana. This research would partly influence Marguerite Béclard d’Harcourt’s musical inspirations. In 1923, she published arrangements of popular indigenous folk melodies from Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, for solo voice, harp, piano, mandolin, guitar, and flute, as well as dances for solo flute, flute and harp, or flute and piano. These publications inaugurated her vast catalogue of harmonisations. Around 1926, she composed Raïmi, a ballet with music for soloists, choir, and orchestra, inspired by Incan ceremonies and performed in 1939 (conducted by Eugène Bigot). A similar American inspiration can be observed in Deux danses créoles (1939) for violin and harp or violin and piano, and in Rapsodie péruvienne (1945) for reed trio. She submitted several of her works to the Société Nationale de Musique and to the Société Musicale Indépendante, and her surviving work comprises forty-odd mélodies (some of which have scores for instruments or orchestra), a dozen choir pieces, three piano pieces, a dozen chamber music pieces, four symphonies, the ballet with soloists and choir Raïmi, and Dierdane, an opera on her own libretto. The majority of these works, fifty or so of which were published, are housed in the French National Library.

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]