Alexandre Stiévenard

Alexandre Stiévenard (Cambrai, 1769 – Ludwigslust, 1855) was a French musician whose life unfolded far from his native land, in northern Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a prosperous merchant, he received an early musical education, although the identity of his teachers is not known with certainty.

In 1789, fleeing the Revolution, he settled in the Low Countries, where he gave concerts and worked first as a violinist and then as musical director of a theatre in Ostend. When French troops invaded the southern Netherlands, he emigrated once more, this time to Bremen and Hamburg, where he became leader of the new Schauspielhaus. In 1796 he entered the service of Duke Rantzau in Ludwigslust as tutor in declamation to the duke's children, and from 1801 he also took part as a violinist at the court. In 1837 he retired and settled in Schwerin.

Stiévenard was, above all, an amateur of notable learning and great versatility. His most valuable written work is an eight-volume biography, Biographie ou Mémoires, which offers a critical view of the musical life of his time. Much of his output as a composer, including violin concertos, quintets, quartets, arias and songs, has been lost. What survives, by contrast, is the collection Recueil d'airs aisez avec accompagnement de guitarre, firmly rooted in the rococo style.