Marie Jaëll was born in 1846 in Steinseltz (Bas-Rhin), to a family of landowners. She began studying piano at age six. In Paris she studied under Henri Herz, receiving a first prize at the Conservatory in 1862. Her career as a prodigy would take her across Europe and England, performing over two hundred concerts between 1855 and 1866, the year she married Alfred Jaëll (1832-1882). She began studying composition in 1871 under Camille Saint-Saëns. Several works for piano served as the inauguration of her creative endeavours, which were encouraged by both her husband and Franz Liszt. She went on to compose a hundred-odd works. In 1875, her Quatuor en sol mineur drew notice, and was followed by several works of chamber music until 1886. In 1876, she became one of the first women composers to be performed at the Société Nationale de Musique, of which she would become a member in 1887. In 1878, she began work on an opera – Runéa – on her own libretto, which remained unfinished. For Ossiane (1879), her symphonic poem with voice, she wrote the text in German, just as she did for her five Lieder (1880). She composed a very unique cycle of mélodies with orchestra, Bärenlieder/La Légende des ours (1878), writing the poems in both versions (German and French), and did the same for her oratorio Am Grabe eines Kindes/Au tombeau d’un enfant (1880). During this prolific period, she also composed her first Concerto en ré mineur pour piano (1877), followed up by a Cello Concerto in 1882 and a second Concerto en ut mineur pour piano in 1884. That same year she composed Sphinx, a piece which prophesied the intensely personal style of the monumental work for piano she composed in 1893-1894, Pièces – Ce qu’on entend dans l’Enfer… le Purgatoire… le Paradis, inspired by Dante. A negative critique from Saint-Saëns is said to have snuffed out her creative fire: she composed almost nothing afterward, concentrating instead on her pedagogic research and its publication.

– Marie-Laure Ingelaere and Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]


The list of works available in Demandez à Clara is based on the catalogue by Marie-Laure Ingelaere, which can be browsed on the site Marie Jaëll, de l’Alsace à l’Europe (Bibliography section).