Biography
Rolande Falcinelli entered the Paris Conservatory in 1932, where her teachers were noted pianist and pedagogue Isidor Philipp and Abel Estyle (piano), Marcel Samuel-Rousseau (harmony), Simone Plé Caussade (counterpoint), Henri Büsser (composition), and Marcel Dupré (organ and improvisation). In 1942, she received the second Grand Prix de Rome in composition. From 1946-1973, she was titular organist at Sacré-Coeur in Paris. Additionally, she taught organ at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau from 1948–1955, and at the École Normale de Musique in Paris from 1948–1955.
In 1948, at Salle Pleyel in Paris, Rolande Falcinelli performed from memory the (then) complete organ works of Marcel Dupré, whose music was in the center of her interests throughout her career as a performer and teacher. In 1955, she succeeded Dupré as professor of organ and improvisation at the Paris Conservatory, where she taught until 1987. Among her numerous students were many brilliant organists of our time, such as Odile Pierre, Pierre Gazin, Xavier Darasse, Louis Thiry, Yves Devernay, Francis Chapelet, André Isoir, Daniel Roth, Jean-Pierre Leguay, Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin, Louis Robillard, Philippe Lefèbvre, Maurice Clerc, Patrice Caire, Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet, and Naji Hakim.
In addition to her numerous organ compositions, she wrote works for piano, harpsichord, solo instruments, orchestra, choir and songs. She also made numerous recordings, including several LPs with compositions of Marcel Dupré at the Auditorium Marcel Dupré in Meudon.
Rolande Falcinelli died on June 11, 2006, at age 86, in Pau, France. From her marriage with Felix Otto, a producer from Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg, Germany, she had a daughter, Sylviane (b. 1956), a French musicologist.
Read more about this topic: Rolande Falcinelli
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)