Candlelights Concert at St. Ephrem Church: Bach, Debussy, Schubert, Liszt

Artists

Eglise Saint-Ephrem

Located in a secluded corner of Paris’ historical fifth arrondissement, also known as the Latin Quarter, this small, quaint church is truly a hidden gem. Constructed in 1733 in true Corinthian style, the church was used by different religious orders until the late 19th century, when it became a centre for the Catholic social movements founded by Robert and Albert de Mun. The interior is classically embellished with an impressive collection of paintings. Church Saint-Ephrem is a popular venue for classical music concerts, as its cosy, intimate atmosphere and great acoustics attract both locals and tourists.

Franz Schubert

During his rather short life, Franz Schubert, one of the fathers of romanticism in music, had always been an unappreciated genius who had never received public acclaim. Only his family and friends were delighted by his music, and most of his works were discovered and published only many years after his death. Franz Schubert was born on the 31th of March 1797 in the suburbs of Vienna. His father and eldest brother were amateur musicians and they taught him to play piano and violin. At the age of 11 Schubert was a singer in a choir at the Lichtenthal parish and later auditioned for Antonio Salieri and admitted to the emperor’s choir. During that period young Franz started composing his own works. However, after his voice broke he had to leave the choir and in 1814 he started working as a teacher in the same parish school as his father. He never stopped composing and 4 years later he decided to quit teaching and devote his life completely to music. He fell out with his father because of that and struggled to make ends meet. In 1818 Schubert went to Vienna, where he met Vogl. Together they gave private concerts in small aristocratic circles, mainly playing Lieder, which Schubert wrote around 600. Franz Schubert gave only one big public concert in his whole life in March 1828, which was very warmly received by the audience. However, his health was deteriorating and in November the same year he died of thyroid fever at the age of 31.

Johann Sebastian Bach

The name Bach and the word musician had long been synonyms in Germany as the world saw 56 musicians from this kin. But it was Johann Sebastian Bach, a genius composer and virtuoso organ player, who shed lustre on his family name. He was born on th 31st of March 1685 in Eisenach, a small town in Thuringia. At the age of 10 he became an orphan and was brought up by his elder brother Johann Christoph, who was an organist in a neighbouring town. His brother was the one to teach music to the young Johann Sebastian. Later he moved to Luneburg where he attended a church school and mastered the techniques of playing violin, viola, piano and organ by the age of 17. Besides that, Bach was a choir singer and later after his voice broke he became a chanter’s assistant. In 1703 Bach was hired as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst III. He earned such a good reputation there that he was later invited to Arnstadt to be an organist at the New Church, where he wrote his best organ works. In 1723 he moved to Leipzig to be a chantor at St. Thomas Church where he stayed until his death of a stroke in 1750. In the year of his death he had undergone unsuccessful eye surgery which lead him to lose his eyesight. During that strenuous time his second wife Anna Magdalena helped him to write his last musical pieces. Bach’s artistic legacy is vast. He created compositions in all genres of the time: oratorias, cantatas, masses, motets, music for organ, piano and violin.

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor of the 19th century Romantic era. He was well-known for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist all over Europe. In fact, he was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School (Neudeutsche Schule) as a composer. Over the course of his career he created extensive and diverse bodies of works that influenced contemporaries and anticipated many 20th-century ideas and trends. For instance, his most notable musical contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, making radical departures in harmony and developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form.