Niedermeyer, Louis (EN)

Niedermeyer Louis Abraham, *27 April 1802 Nyon, †15 March 1861 Paris, Swiss composer and teacher. He initially studied music with his father, later with I. Moscheles and E.A. Förster in Vienna (1817–19), then with V. Fioravanti in Rome and N.A. Zingarelli in Naples, where he became acquainted with G. Rossini. From 1821 he worked as a piano teacher in Geneva, and between 1834 and 1836 at the Gaggia Institute in Brussels. From 1836 he lived in Paris, where in 1852 he transformed the École Choron, founded in 1818 by E.A. Choron, into a new school of church music called École Niedermeyer, in which organists and composers of church music were trained. Thanks to state subsidies and Niedermeyer’s energy and competence, this school, being the only center in France for the education of youth in Roman chant and classical polyphony, became one of the best music institutions in the country and soon gained considerable international renown. Niedermeyer also organized performances of early sacred music and its publication, thus contributing to the reform of church music and to research on chant and Roman liturgy conducted by the Benedictines of Solesmes. From 1857 to 1862 he co-directed, together with J. d’Ortigue, the journal “La Maîtrise”, founded jointly by them, devoted to problems of church music.

Niedermeyer is remembered in music history primarily as the founder of the École Niedermeyer. He began his compositional activity, inspired and assisted by G. Rossini, with opera, but after the failure of almost all his operatic productions he devoted himself to sacred music. Although he was a Protestant, he made significant contributions to the comprehensive development of Catholic church music in France. He is most highly regarded, however, for his output in the field of solo song. Breaking with the traditional French romance, he placed the main emphasis on the importance of the poetic text (he wrote to texts by outstanding poets, including A. de Lamartine and V. Hugo) and on word–music relationships; he created a type of song with flowing melodic writing, which gave rise to a new song style that later appeared in the works of, among others, H. Duparc, C. Debussy, and G. Fauré.

Literature: A. Niedermeyer Niedermeyer, son oeuvre et son école, Paris 1867; [A. Niedermeyer] Vie d’un compositeur moderne, Fontainebleau 1892, repr. Paris 1893; H. Kling Le Centenaire d’un compositeur suisse célèbre. Louis Niedermeyer, Paris 1902; M. Galerne L’Ecole Niedermeyer, Paris 1928, J.C. Kidd, H. Vredeveld Louis Niedermayer’s system for Gregorian chant accompaniment as a compositional source for Gabriel Fauré, a dissertation at the University of Chicago (Illinois) 1973; B. Lespinard Les passions du chœur: la musique chorale et ses pratiques en France, 1800–1950, Paris 2018.