Invisible Greatness
Joseph Bologne was a composer whose genius rivaled, some say surpassed, Mozart’s. Why are we just hearing about him now?
Up until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard the name Joseph Bologne.
Many people in my world whom I thought would know or should know the name — those who support classical music; those who appreciate and study classical music; those who play classical music — never heard the name, either. (One friend thought I was referring to Brooklyn-born actor, Joe Bologna, who starred in My Favorite Year and Blame It on Rio.)
If it wasn’t for host Lisa Flynn of Chicago’s WFMT who played Bologne’s symphony in G Major during a recent midday show, it would have taken an upcoming biopic to introduce me and millions of other Americans to a genius that, frankly, we should have heard about and learned about decades ago.
Known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Bologne (or, alternatively, Boulogne) was an 18th-century French composer, violinist, fencer, soldier, and revolutionary.
He was also Black.
His is an utterly remarkable story: the son of a wealthy colonist from Guadeloupe and a Senegalese slave, he was raised and educated in Paris. Bologne grew up to become a contemporary — and a rival — of Mozart. The writer of an April article in BBC Music Magazine’s Classical Music suggested that “Mozart may have borrowed Bologne’s material in some of his own writing.”
Recognized as the first violin virtuoso, Bologne was recommended for the directorship at the Académie Royale de Musique. He would have received the role, too, had it not been for his undesirable skin color.
After the storming of the Bastille in 1789, he threw in with the revolutionaries and fought for the French Republic. Bologne served as a colonel in the Légion Saint-Georges, a regiment of Black soldiers — the first in continental Europe.
Since hearing his work on WFMT, I’ve been exploring his catalog on YouTube Music, which, for me, has been a profound and exhilarating experience. Imagine spending a good chunk of your life thinking you’ve heard all the names of all the major baroque composers and suddenly one more — maybe the biggest, the most impressive, the most heroic of them all — appears on your radar?
It’s like discovering a new emotion.
Yes — this journey has been exhilarating. And shameful, too.
As thrilled as I am that at long last Bologne is getting his due with airplay and an upcoming film, I’m more than a little saddened that the norms of race have conspired to keep Bologne and his works a secret from so many, for so long.
How many more geniuses in how many more fields, one wonders, remain unknown for the same reasons, though they are surely “reasons” that reason knows nothing about.
In The Shock of The New, Robert Hughes rhetorically ponders what “the later history of modern art” would have been if World War I — the Great War — had never occurred.
“It is impossible to know,” he concludes.
“The war gutted an entire generation…we know the names of some artists who died…but for every one of those names there must have been scores, even hundreds, of men who never had a chance to develop.
“If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.”
This is a grim yet effective analog for the ravages of racism, which has left and is still leaving the greatness — and the stories — of untold numbers of men and women “in the trenches.”
But we’re not talking about the near- destruction of one generation, as was the case with World War I. The ancient norms of race that continue to inform modern-day decisions about who tells the stories and who teaches the lessons in our schools — and what stories and which lessons will be told and taught — effectively destroyed the lives of multiple generations.
Once again — obliteration by omission.
A greatness that we can neither erase nor ignore completely will be minimized, lest it somehow subtracts from the genius of the “divinely” privileged, the accepted, the known.
“When the announcement [of the biopic] was made, headlines resurrected yet another moniker for [Bologne]: ‘Black Mozart,’” wrote Marcos Balter in The New York Times shortly after Searchlight Pictures green-lighted the Bologne project.
“Presumably intended as a compliment, this erasure of [Bologne’s] name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history.”
True, but what also matters here is that we give ourselves permission to accept history not as something frozen, fully formed — over — but as something organic and mutable, and far, far from finished.
“A work in progress,” if you will, to borrow Mary Beard’s excellent phrase.
Still, a disturbing fact lingers: Without a long over-due biopic, a scant amount of biographers — when compared to Mozart’s roster— or the classical music radio host who curates her playlist to entertain, to inspire, and to teach — Joseph Bologne would remain one of posterity’s unknown Black soldiers, the victim of a different kind of “Great War.”
And not because the remains of his genius could not be identified, but because the color of Bologne’s skin meant that his genius never counted.
