Song of a Nation by Robert Harris

Author:Robert Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Lavallée’s frustration over the fruitlessness of his campaign despite the success of the cantata was exacerbated by the fact that he found himself personally on the hook for many of the expenses incurred in mounting the event. Lavallée had been given a budget for it, but he had spent more than allotted to ensure the very best performance possible, adding extra rehearsals, bringing in soloists from abroad, and attending to every detail. Depending on whose account you read (and how sympathetic they were to the composer), Lavallée either was told to go ahead and spare no cost by his government commissioners or else he wilfully spent more money than he had out of sheer impudence or negligence. But in either case, it should have been irrelevant. Even if he had managed the expenses poorly, one would have thought that, given the success of the performance and the political importance of that success, someone would have found a way to reimburse the one person most responsible for it.

No one did, and the debts that Lavallée incurred over the cantata performance hung over him for many years. It seems a cruel injustice. It may be that Lavallée was a victim of the confusing and changing political situation in Quebec at the time. When the cantata had been presented in June, Luc Letellier de St. Just had been the lieutenant-governor of Quebec and Henri-Gustave Joly the premier. By October, they were both gone, Letellier having been fired by John A. Macdonald and Joly succeeded as premier by Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau. So both the chief politicians who had commissioned the cantata from Lavallée were now history, and their opponents were in power. Maybe they denied Lavallée’s claims out of spite; maybe the claims just got lost in the government shuffle.

It should also be noted that Calixa Lavallée had enemies within the musical establishment of Quebec. Lavallée’s insistence on a professionalized, authoritative school of musical instruction raised the hackles of the amateur, poorly trained, occasional music teachers in the province; they were convinced that higher professional standards might put them out of business. This may not seem like a very potent lobbying force, but music teachers in every part of the province allied with each other did have a certain political clout. Lavallée would face exactly the same sort of opposition in the United States half a decade later while attempting to professionalize American musical education. It’s impossible to make any change in a complex society without disenfranchising someone—and those about to be disenfranchised seldom accept that change without a fight.

Whatever the reasons, what should have been Lavallée’s greatest triumph on his return to Quebec, the Lorne cantata, turned into one of his biggest nightmares. Exhausted from the work of both composition and performance, saddled with debts of which no one would relieve him, and no closer to his cherished conservatory project, Lavallée entered 1880, just after his thirty-seventh birthday, ill and dispirited.

What he could not know in that January was that the events of the next six months would cement his reputation forever.

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