Calixa Lavallée

Calixa Lavallée was a Canadian pianist, composer, and educator in the late 19th century. He is best known as the composer of the Canadian national anthem, O Canada. He was born in Verchères, Quebec in 1842 to a modest and musical family. He showed an early interest in music and was initially taught by his father, who was a conductor and musical instrument craftsman. In 1850 his family moved to St. Hyacinthe, where he attended school. When Lavallée was 11 years old, he served as the organist for the chorus of the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montréal, when the ensemble performed in St. Hyacinthe and needed an organist at the last minute. The chorus master, Laxare-Arsène Barbarin, was very impressed with Lavallée's performance and predicted that he would have a bright future in music. Two years later he traveled to Montreal where he studied piano with Paul Letondal and Charles Wugk Sabatier. At the young age of 15, Lavallée realized that Canada did not have a thriving music community and that he would need to move if he wanted to be a successful musician. This realization led him to Rhode Island, where he supported himself by playing the violin, cornet, and piano with a traveling minstrel ensemble. He performed in this capacity until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, when he joined the 4th Rhode Island Infantry Regiment as a band musician. He was wounded at the Battle of Antietam and was discharged from service later in 1862. He briefly returned to the minstrel shows before travelling back to Verchères in late 1863. He lived and worked in Montreal from 1864 to 1865, and then he returned to the U.S. and traveled to California, Louisiana, and then to New England. It was also around this time when he met Josephine Gentilly, and they were married in 1867. By 1870, Lavallée and his wife were living in New York, where he was the director of the New York Grand Opera House. However, this appointment came to an end in 1872 after the owner of the theater was murdered. These unfortunate circumstances led him to Montreal where his patron Léon Derome organized a subscription concert series to cover the costs of Lavallée's continued education. The series was a success and allowed for him to study at the Paris Conservatory from 1873 to 1875. He studied piano with Antoine-Francois Marmontel, and his composition professors were François Bazin and Adrien Louis Victor Boieldieu. After he completed his schooling, he spent the next five years in Canada where he taught piano lessons and he performed in Montreal and Quebec City. He also unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Canadian government to help fund a music conservatory. In 1879 he was commissioned by the government of Quebec to compose a cantata to celebrate the visit of the governor general of Canada. The work was well-received, but Lavallée was never compensated for the many musicians that he hired for the performance which drove him into considerable debt. The following year he composed O Canada, which finally became the official Canadian national anthem in 1980. Throughout the 1880s, he performed in the United States as the accompanist for Hungarian soprano Etelka Gerster, and he also played on a ferry that traveled between Boston and New York. He began suffering from tuberculosis in 1890, which eventually took his life in 1891. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi