Alexis Contant

Alexis Contant (Montreal, 1858 – Montreal, 1918) was one of the first Canadian composers of note who was not trained in Europe. Born and died in Montreal, he is of interest because he showed that a musician from his country could develop a personal idiom through the private study of the music of his own day.

His training was largely self-taught. He learned the organ and piano with S. Fowles and gave his first public concert at the age of thirteen. He later accompanied various performers in recital, among them the violinist Jehin-Prume, who advised him to travel to Europe to study. He did not do so for any length of time: he received brief lessons from Calixa Lavallée in Boston and consulted Guillaume Couture, with whom he disagreed on questions of style. His models were Bach, Weber, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Franck and, above all, Gounod, whose influence can be heard in some of his songs.

As a teacher he enjoyed great esteem, giving classes at numerous colleges and schools and private lessons in his studio to musicians such as Claude Chapagne, Rodolphe Mathieu and Wilfrid Pelletier. He composed several masses for choir and orchestra and, somewhat unusually for Canada in the early twentieth century, most of his nearly one hundred works were performed during his lifetime, although very few were published.

His oratorio Caïn, the first Canadian oratorio, was premiered on 12 November 1905 with a choir of 250 voices, five soloists and 50 instrumentalists, a notable figure for Montreal at the time. In 1909 he composed Les deux âmes, which he himself described as a symphonic poem; the composer Damrosch, after reading the manuscript, considered it a work of great craftsmanship. That same year he wrote the symphonic poem L'aurore, in which the influences of Wagner, Gounod and Franck give way to more original ideas, with dissonances close to Sibelius and Strauss, according to a commentary of the period.

His legacy rests mainly on his chamber music: his Piano Trio (1907) is the work of his that has been performed most often since. In 1914 he embarked on an opera based on Véronica, by Louis Fréchette, of which he completed only the overture. Much of his output remains in manuscript, held in Ottawa.