Hélène de Montgeroult – A once-forgotten musician ahead of her time: virtuoso pianist, composer and pedagogue.
 
Variation on Étude No. 66 is a freely rearranged version of Étude No. 66 from Hélène de Montgeroult’s Cours complet for pianists, a major contribution to the French piano repertoire between the Classical and Romantic periods. A 5-page facsimile of the 1877 edition of the original, lyrical Étude, marked as ‘16me Étude for the left hand - pour les basses faites à contre tems’ (sic) (for bass lines played off-beat), is also included in this Fullscore edition, for reference.
 
French composer and pianist de Montgeroult, born in 1764 in Lyon, plays a key pianistic link between Mozart (1756-1791), Clementi (1752-1832) and Chopin (1810-1849), adapting to the rapid development during her lifetime of the fortepiano. She was raised in Paris, where she took piano lessons from several masters and married Marquis André Marie Gautier de Montgeroult in 1784 (she was 20, he 48). She played with virtuosity in the celebrated Parisian salons of wealthy music lovers and social élite in the 1780s, before the French Revolution. The story of how she avoided the guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1789-1799) by performing improvisations of La Marseillaise on the fortepiano may perhaps be apocryphal, but the Marquise managed to avoid that dreadful fate, despite her noble status.
 
Appointed in 1795 as the first ever woman teacher at the new Conservatoire de Paris, she gained a salary equal to that of her male counterparts. Her first composition for keyboard was published in 1795, aged 35; her Cours complet pour l’enseignement du fortepiano comprenant 114 études (written between 1788 and 1812) is said to have had ‘a significant impact on great names among musicians of the next generation’.
 
Her first husband was murdered in 1793, aged 57. She later married a Count who was 19 years her junior in 1820, but was widowed again in 1826. Her health started to decline and she settled with her son in Italy, dying there in 1836. She has been described as a ‘precursor of Romanticism’; Mendelssohn, Schubert, Chopin and Schumann may not have known her Cours complet but elements in their piano music ‘show evidence of their originality’ in Montgeroult’s fine 972 exercises and 114 études for pianists.
 
Hélène de Montgeroult was a liberated, audacious woman with a strong personality and influential talent in a time when women were reduced to a secondary role in life. Once forgotten and committed to ‘the guillotine of oblivion’, her rediscovery (boosted by a definitive biography written by Jérome Dorival in 2006) was long overdue and sheds light on the evolution of the French piano repertoire and the French romanticism that emerged in the history of music at the turn of the 18th century.
 
 
Recommended recordings of the original Étude 66: Bruno Robilliard (La Marquise et la Marseillaise CD, Editions Hortus, 2005); Jean-Yves Serreault (with moving original score on YouTube).
Digital reference performance of this Fullscore Variation on Étude 66 arrangement: fullscoremusic.co.uk
 
A set of Three Études from Cours complet (Nos. 26, 36 & 111) by Hélène de Montgeroult is also available (in original format) in a newly re-engraved edition from fullscoremusic.co.uk
 
- Definitive biography by Jérome Dorival: Hélène de Montgeroult – La marquise et la Marseillaise (pub. 2006, Editions Modulation)
- Sheet music cover image: Chateau de Montgeroult, Val d’Oise, France  
- Reimagined, arranged and engraved for solo piano by Nigel Edmund-Jones and Fullscore Publishing
- Published to celebrate International Piano Day, March 29 2025