With the three compact discs of The Golden Century of French Waltzes (1830-1930), already featuring Francis POPY one year before Cameron's TITANIC, Jean-Louis Pasteur discloses for you the magic of the vanished music which Waltz and Quadrille composers used to create in France a hundred years ago...


Jean-Louis PASTEUR's
channels and videos :






including, from these records :

Les Roses (CD 1, track 3)

Son Flirt (CD 2, track 12)

La Valse Poudrée (CD 2, track 16)

Brillante Etoile (CD 3, track 1)

Veuillez cliquer ici pour lire cette page en français
Jean-Louis PASTEUR offers you to listen, while reading this page,
to © his performing Olivier Métra's suite of waltzes "Les Roses"
(3rd track of the record "Le Tourbillon de la Fête")

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Jean-Louis PASTEUR

revives

THE GOLDEN CENTURY OF FRENCH WALTZES

(1830-1930)

through a set of three compact discs


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Welcome ! You are the st/nd/rd/th visitor of this site.

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© Original illustrations by Chantal Bellon

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CD1 / Le Tourbillon de la Fête (1830-1880) - Whirling Feasts / July Monarchy and Second Empire.

Contents: Skaters' Waltz of course, by Frenchissimo composer Emile WALDTEUFEL;
Lancers' Quadrille, an Irish dance with a good few of French blood in it;
but also, brimming over with vitality and melodic inventiveness, eight wonderful pieces
sunk into oblivion for a hundred years and recorded here for the first time.

Reference: J.L.P. 9511 / Duration: 67 minutes / Inside texts in French.

Please click here for comprehensive and detailed table of contents.

Le Tourbillon de la Fête is also introduced on Youtube. Please click here to see the slideshow : Olivier METRA's Les Roses.


CD2 / L'Ivresse de l'Idylle (1880-1930) - Elating Romances / Belle Epoque and Années Folles.

Contents: Sixteen uncommon pieces pressed on disc for the first time,
Francis POPY and fifteen other ball and salon composers to be rediscovered :
an excursion into the refined and sentimental dreamland of Belle Epoque and Années Folles,
an invitation to succumb to the airy charms of slow and hesitation waltz.

Reference: J.L.P. 9610 / Duration: 74 minutes / Inside texts in French.

Please click here for comprehensive and detailed table of contents.

L'Ivresse de l'Idylle is also introduced on Youtube. Please click here to see the slideshows : Francis POPY's La Valse poudrée or Paul JEANJEAN's Son Flirt.


CD3 / Froufrous sous les Pampilles - Rustles beneath Crystals.

Contents: The Belle Epoque hit Fascination by Fermo MARCHETTI ;
Indiana by Chopin's contemporary Gatien MARCAILHOU ;
but also nine wonderful waltzes by forgotten composers from July Monarchy to Années Folles.
The record also hosts the charming Carezza by the Spanish Francophile Enrique GRANADOS,
an elegy by Albert JUNGMANN, a German who involved himself in French entertainment music,
and two waltzes by Jean-Louis PASTEUR.

The subscription launched for this CD on February 15th 2016 has failed and was closed out on December 31st 2017.
So the CD will not be industrially manufactured nor published but it is nevertheless available in the form of burned prototype.

Reference: J.L.P. 1712 / Duration: 79 minutes

Please click here for comprehensive and detailed table of contents.

Froufrou sous les Pampilles is also introduced on Youtube. Please click here to see the seven video playlist : Rustles beneath Crystals.


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1) About French Waltzes of the 19th Century.
2) How to find those compact discs ?

3) More pages by Jean-Louis PASTEUR


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1) About French Waltzes of the 19th Century.

While an Austrian-German origin for waltz can hardly be argued about nowadays, the fact is that France did dance waltz a lot. From the ruling Bourbons' twilight and the decline of minuet until jazz emerged and Latin rhythms broke up along with Afro-American ones, the French never ceased to swirl with waltz's three-beat cadence - both an emanation and an illustration, a sample and a symbol of the European civilization all along those hundred years of enthusiasm and expansion.

Alternatively cheerful or mournful, lively or languid, waltzes were a staple of every festive party, in popular balls as well as court solemnities, in public parks and kiosks as well as salons, under the delicate fingers of ethereal pianists as well as through the blares of vigorous brass and reed village bands.

And yet -! This repertoire which enchanted so many generations ended up in the oubliettes of history. The French people, being ready to think that waltzes are a strictly Viennese item, has retained nothing from the hundreds of composers who enlivened French festivites during a full century. The very rare survivors of this mnemonic wreck owe their survival to their being of bold enough temper to cross the English channel or the Atlantic or the river Rhine. By now they have taken, in Anglo-Saxon and/or Germanic directories and musical dictionaries, a place which is denied to a music contemptuously dubbed "light" by the French official art establishment.

In 1989, Jean-Louis PASTEUR settled down to the heavy task of bringing a new life to this piece of his country's heritage. The beautiful dance that is waltz, if cherished in the whole West, took up particular traits with every one of its adopting lands. The French waltz can be distinguished by its melodic expressivity, a hard-to-resist liveliness, and high elegance. It is a strikingly fine expression of the easy and radiant joie de vivre the City of Light and the nation it brightened were seen as incarnating.

By tirelessly searching, with the help of Chantal Bellon, attics, private collections, second-hand stores and markets, old bookstore or publishing house inventories, and above all through the files and inexhaustible treasures of France's national library, J.L.P. is conducting his exploration over more than three hundred composers and some five thousand scores. No doubt these could provide, after careful deciphering and a selection based on emotional power and style quality, the stuff for a score of compact discs.

PASTEUR is a piano player, a guitar player, a singer, a composer, a waltzer awarded by Fédération Française de Danse, and a data processing expert. He first renders the waltzes in a piano version. Then he uses the techniques of computer-aided music in order to treat, edit and, chiefly, register over a very large timbre palette the sound files of some of these pieces where, in this way, the nerve and rhythm of the keyboard is doubled with the color and evocative force of instrumental and synthetic sounds.

He also is the financial hand behind this project, after the manner of the free and venturesome 19th-century artists whom, he says, he feels honored to care for.

(Translated from the French by Georges PASTEUR)


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2) How to find those compact discs ?

The three discs of the Golden Century of French Waltzes are available by direct order from Jean-Louis PASTEUR.

Would you like to acquire them ? To get more information and/or leave a message, please consult the price-list and order form of Jean-Louis PASTEUR's editions.


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3) More pages by Jean-Louis PASTEUR


In English
Who is Jean-Louis PASTEUR ?

Jean-Louis PASTEUR's FLAMENCO GUITAR Teaching Set

Jean-Louis PASTEUR's References

In French
Le Siècle d'Or de la Valse Française (1830-1930)

Jean-Louis PASTEUR: Récital solo a cappella de CHANT GREGORIEN

Jean-Louis PASTEUR : POST-SCRIPTUM

Poésie: Quand la Langue Française se fait Musique.

Poésie: LETTRE AUX FEES



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© February 1997 by Jean-Louis PASTEUR, last updating : 2018 December 12th by Jean-Louis PASTEUR, http://jeanlouispasteur.org/