Georges , Comte de Saint-Foix

Georges de Saint-Foix, Count of Saint-Foix, was born in Paris in 1874 and died in Aix-en-Provence in 1954. He was one of the most distinguished French musicologists of his generation, with a clearly defined speciality: the music of the eighteenth century and, in particular, the work of Mozart. His name is closely associated with the study of the symphony and of Viennese Classicism, at a time when French musicology was becoming professionalised.

He studied law at the Sorbonne, but his vocation turned towards music. At the Schola Cantorum in Paris he was a pupil of d'Indy, where he studied the violin, gaining a diploma in 1906, and music theory; he became a fine quartet player. From 1900, encouraged by Théodore de Wyzewa, he devoted himself entirely to musicology. In 1901 he founded the Société Mozart with Wyzewa and Adolphe Boschot. He later took part in the artistic direction of the Aix-en-Provence festival, was a founding member of the Société Française de Musicologie, of which he served as president on two occasions, and was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He received honours from the Austrian government and from the Mozarteum in Salzburg, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

His principal work is a five-volume study of Mozart's life and works. He wrote the first two volumes, covering the period up to 1777, together with Wyzewa. The method, based on meticulous analysis and on chronological classification according to style, was unprecedented in its day. Later research has identified errors of chronology and has considered the approach overly schematic, yet the book retains its value, above all for its detailed accounts of Mozart's precursors and contemporaries. This interest in Mozart's influence on his successors, especially Beethoven and Schubert, also runs through his articles on Schobert, Gluck, Sammartini and J. C. Bach, as well as his review of Picquot's book on Boccherini.

Today he is remembered above all as the author of standard reference studies on Classicism, and as a scholar who laid methodological foundations for the chronology of Mozart's works, although his conclusions should be checked against more recent source research.