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The French pianist, music educator, writer and composer of Catalan origin, Marie Blanche Selva (Catalan: Blanca Selva i Henry), displayed musical talents at the age of four-and-a-half. Because her father could not find a good teacher for his daughter in Brive, in 1891 he moved the family to Limoges and then to Paris, where she began lessons with Sophie Chéné who prepared her for entrance to the Paris Conservatoire. She was admitted in 1893 to a preparatory class, and at the age of 10 won a première médaille in competition, but left the Conservatory without graduating. In July 1896 the family left Paris for Geneva and on her 13th birthday, she gave her first concert in public in Lausanne. Not long after, she played Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 54 at the Kursaal de Montreux.
At the age of 14, Blanche Selva played Symphonie sur un air montagnard français by Vincent d’Indy and the following year met the composer. She went to the Schola Cantorum in Paris to study composition with d’Indy with whom she became close friends. In December 1901, when she was 18, d’Indy appointed Selva to the staff of the Schola Cantorum, where she taught piano for the next twenty years. Between her appointment at the Schola Cantorum and the outbreak of World War I, she performed in Belgium, Switzerland, England, and, in 1908, toured Russia with d’Indy. In 1904, by the age of 20, she gave s17 recitals in Paris in which she performed the complete solo keyboard works of J.S. Bach. She was the only French pianist of her time to specialise in Czech music, and she was consequently very popular in Czechoslovakia. She continued to tour and work as a concert pianist in Europe.
In 1907 an unknown Blanche Selva appeared in London announcing concerts for almost every day of a week in November at Steinway Hall. Her first recital was an all-Bach programme. The critic of The Times was impressed: ‘Her touch is very agreeable, she has great power of light and shade, a genuine love and reverence for the greatest thoughts of the greatest men, and, while her technical equipment is complete, her phrasing and interpretation generally give her a claim to a place in the first rank of contemporary players.’ A few days later he wrote, ‘Each day increases the high esteem in which the beautiful piano-forte playing of Mlle Blanche Selva is held by musical people; while her reading of Bach was dignified, her Beethoven broad and intellectual, and her Schumann so sympathetic that she seemed to be a pupil of the composer or of his wife, her first recital of modern composers, showed her in a new light, and made the compositions she played appear of the greatest value.’
Blanche Selva met many contemporary composers and knew Albert Roussel, Paul Dukas, Déodat de Séverac and Isaac Albéniz, with whom she was close during the composition of Iberia. She premiered all four books of Isaac Albéniz's piano suite Iberia: Book 1 in 1906, Book 2 (which was dedicated to Selva) in 1907 and Book 3 in 1909. She had many works dedicated to her including d’Indy’s Piano Sonata (1908) and his Thème varié, fugue et chanson (1926), Roussel’s Suite Op. 14 (1911), and many works by Déodat de Séverac. She was acknowledged by Paul Dukas as the greatest exponent of his Piano Sonata and his Variations, Interlude and Finale on a theme of Rameau, and gave many first performances including Gabriel Fauré’s Nocturne No. 13 in B minor Op. 119 written in December 1921.
From 1921 Blanche Selva divided her time between performing and teaching at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg, the École Normale de Musique in Paris, and the Prague Conservatory and decided to leave her post at the Schola Cantorum. Three years later she met the Catalan violinist Joan Massia, gave concerts with him, and the following year (1925) settled in Spain where she founded her own music school in Barcelona. In 1927, the centenary year of L.v. Beethoven's death, she performed all his thirty-two piano sonatas in Barcelona and the violin sonatas with Massia. She was asked to write the biography of Déodat de Séverac who had died six years earlier, and this task occupied her from 1927 to 1929. In November 1930, during a recital in the presence of d’Indy, she suffered a stroke, leaving her partially paralysed; as a result, the remainder of her life was spent teaching, writing and composing. In 1936 she left Barcelona because of the Spanish Civil War and lived for a while in Marseille, then Moulins, Allier, and Saint-Saturnin (south of Clemont-Ferrand), Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne. Suffering from cancer, she entered a hospital in Saint-Amant-Tallende, where she died in December 1942 at age 59.
Blanche Selva wrote a number of books in addition to the biography of Déodat de Séverac which was published in Paris in 1930. As early as 1913 she published a book on the sonata (La Sonate, Paris, 1913), and between 1916 and 1924 published three volumes on piano technique (L’enseignement musical de la technique du piano, Paris, 1924)
Undoubtedly a great pianist, Blanche Selva is almost forgotten today as she made very few recordings. Her style was not based on the traditional French precepts of piano playing, but relied far more on the arm weight and relaxation technique employed by German and English teachers. Her recordings were made for French Columbia between 1928 and 1930, just before she became paralysed, and all are wonderful. In her recording of J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B flat BWV 825 we can hear the pianist who was so highly praised in 1907 when she played J.S. Bach in London. She plays J.S. Bach pure and simple; there are no posturings, no arrogance of self-divined authenticity, and no effects for the sake of display or reverence. In her recording of César Franck’s Prelude, Choral et Fugue (which still remains one of the best along with that by Cortot), Selva seems to plumb the very depths of C. Franck’s soul; while her three recordings of short pieces by de Séverac make one long to hear more of Selva in this repertoire. With Joan Massia she recorded C. Franck’s Violin Sonata, L.v. Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata Op. 24 and an Adagio by J.S. Bach as a filler on the last side of the 78rpm discs. The J.S. Bach partita and one of the de Séverac pieces have been reissued by Pearl; the remaining recordings (minus the Franck Sonata) have been reissued on compact disc by Malibran-Music. All her 1928-1930 recordings were reissued by Solstice in 2018. |
