Stendhal (real name, Marie-Henri Beyle)

Stendhal (real name, Marie-Henri Beyle), famous French writer; b. Grenoble, Jan. 23, 1783; d. Paris, March 23, 1842. He received some lessons in singing, violin, and clarinet. He served as a military official under Napoleon, taking part in the German and Russian campaigns; from 1815 he lived in Milan, Paris, and Rome, and in 1830 he became French consul at Trieste, from 1831 in Civitavecchia. He became best known as a novelist (Le Rouge et le noir, La Chartreuse de Parme, etc.), but also wrote on music; under the name César Bombet, he pubi. Lettres écrites de Vienne, en Autriche, sur le célèbre compositeur Haydn, suivies d’une vie de Mozart, et de considérations sur Métastase et l’état présent de la musique en France et en Italie (Paris, 1814; Eng. tr., London, 1817; new ed., 1817, as Vies de Haydn, Mozart et Métastase, by Stendhal; republ., 1914, by R. Rolland). The life of Haydn is in part tr. from Carpani’s Le Haydine; the first 4 chapters of the life of Mozart are taken from Schlichtegroll’s Necrology (1791), the last 3 from Cramer’s Anecdotes sur Mozart. In Jan. 1824 Stendhal’s life of Rossini was pubi, in London as Memoirs of Rossini, in a tr. made from the original MS (republ. as The Life of Rossini, London, 1956); the French version, considerably expanded, was pubi, in Paris as Vie de Rossini (1824; second ed., rev., 1922 by H. Prunières; Eng. tr., 1956; second ed., rev., 1970).

Bibliography

A. Paupe, Histoire des oeuvres de S. (Paris, 1903); A. Beau, Das Verhältnis S.s zur Musik (diss., Univ. of Hamburg, 1930); D. Maurice, S. (Paris, 1931); P. Jourda, S., L’Homme et l’oeuvre (Paris, 1934); F. Green, S. (Cambridge, 1939).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire