1776–1858 · France, United Kingdom · Romantic
Pauline Duchambge was a French pianist, singer and composer who died in Paris in 1858. She wrote romances for voice and piano to poems by writers of her day and was a friend of the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In her songs the melodies are simple, and the piano part has ostinatos, arpeggios and solid chords.
Pauline de Montet was born into a noble family. She was brought to Paris and raised in a convent, where she also learned the piano.
In 1792 she left the convent, and in 1796 she married Baron Duchambge, her first cousin. The marriage broke down, but she kept her husband's surname. The couple had two children: a son who died at the age of five, and a daughter.
In 1798 both of her parents died and the family lost its fortune. It was after these events that her musical education became truly serious. She studied harmony and composition with Auber and Cherubini, and piano and composition with Jan Ladislav Dussek.
Cherubini wrote several compositions for her. Auber was her companion and placed more than three hundred of her romances in the library of the Paris Conservatoire. In 1814 her pension was withdrawn and she resolved to give music lessons.
In 1815 Duchambge met the poet and novelist Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. The acquaintance grew into a lifelong friendship and a working partnership. The friendship is recorded in an extensive correspondence and in a number of songs that Duchambge set to her friend's poems.
She also mixed with other leading authors of her time and set their texts to music, among them Hugo, Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Vigny. At that time she was at the height of her career. Her romances were very popular in the first years of the Restoration.
Eleven of Duchambge's individual songs and song albums appeared between 1827 and 1841 with leading Parisian publishers, among them Pleyel. Her music also reached German audiences, issued by the Berlin publisher Schlesinger and by the firm of Schott in Mainz.
Duchambge's life was hard: she struggled with poverty, poor health and disappointments in love, and her music conveys these feelings. As the fashion for the romance faded, a decline in her own fortunes followed.
Ruined and forgotten, she died in Paris on 23 April 1858. Her friend Desbordes-Valmore died in 1859.
Duchambge wrote romances: in the nineteenth century this was a very popular salon genre, midway between lyric music and folk song, and one often taken up by women. Besides romances she wrote a few pieces for piano. Fetis noted a soft sensibility and an elegance of form in her melodies.
She often chose pastoral texts about the feelings of love typical of the early nineteenth century. Her songs are strophic, usually without a refrain. The melodies are simple and diatonic, within the range of a ninth, often ornamented with grace notes and a few accents, and there are few dynamic markings. She follows the words closely and shows changes of mood within a single verse.
Her harmony has plenty of variety: modulations and secondary dominants, and a single song may set major and minor side by side. The piano part has ostinatos, arpeggios and solid chords. A song may begin at once with the voice or with an introduction that sets the mood and the key, and the last bars of the accompaniment often serve as a link to the next verse.
Some of her songs were also published in the twentieth century, in a collection of 1931 and an anthology of 1988, and some have been recorded on CD. The site has an edition of “Prière des laboureurs” for voice and piano, level “intermediate+”.