Fontainebleau in Newport

In the past 20 years many a young U. S. musician, waiting in the wings for a career, has had an elegant, last-minute, Gallic primping: a summer at Fontainebleau near Paris. Dr. Walter Damrosch started the idea, after running a wartime school in which U. S. bandmasters took a high French polish. The late Composer Camille Saint-Saens helped found, and the late Composer Maurice Ravel long figure-headed, Fontainebleau's American Conservatory, for which the French Government made available the Louis XV wing of the old royal palace. As many as 180 students worked with France's greatest music teachers there each summer.

Now the Fontainebleau school is gone. The merriest and best-loved of its teachers, 77-year-old Isidore Philipp (piano), is a penniless refugee in the Pyrenees. Pince-nezed, schoolmarmish Nadia Boulanger, coach of many a young composer, was last seen driving away with her most precious possessions piled high in an automobile. Few other Fontainebleau teachers have been heard from at all. But two pianists, Robert Casadesus and his pretty wife Gaby, are in the U. S. Last week they started up the Fontainebleau tradition at Newport, R. I.*

Pianist Casadesus, an able concert artist, was touring the U. S. at the behest of the French Government when Beatrice Sendler, president of the Fontainebleau alumni association, thought of forming a Fontainebleau piano class. A friend, John Frothingham, persuaded his old school, St. George's in Newport, to lend its buildings. For piano classes with M. and Mme Casadesus, and French diction under Mme Marthe Pillois (widow of a minor French composer), the transplanted Fontainebleau conservatory signed up 25 students, most of them Fontainebleau alumni. Two talented newcomers were Dominican nuns, Sister Ignatia and Sister M. Louisita.

*For news of a Fontainebleau art school on Cape Cod, see p. 42.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.