| Information: |
Amélie-Julie Candeille (1767, Paris — 1834, Paris) was a French composer, librettist, writer, singer, actress, comedienne.
Julie Candeille described herself in her Mémoires as having "bright blonde hair, brown eyes, white, fine and clear skin, [and] a soft and laughing air". According to her colleague the actress Louise Fusil, Candeille was pretty, with "a well-taken size, a noble gait, [and] traits and whiteness as held by creole women". Her ancestry had no real Creole elements, however, and was actually Flemish. She owed her appearance, many talents and natural seductiveness to her own ambition.
Candeille, like many women musicians of her time, came from a musical family. Her father Pierre Joseph Candeille (1744–1827) was a composer, actor and low-bass opera-singer in the chorus, though he ended up exiled in Moulins where he became a theatre director. Her father was her primary teacher, and some have speculated that his deeply invested interest in his daughter's education was an effort to bolster his career. Candeille developed her natural talents for song and harpsichord and performed extensively while still a child in chamber orchestras. Aged 7 she played in a concert before the French king and she was said to have played a concert alongside the teenage Mozart. By the age of 13 she had performed in public as a singer, pianist and harpist. Aged 14, she was initiated into the "La Candeur" masonic lodge, in which she met several playwrights such as Olympe de Gouges and other influential figures who favoured her artistic career in Parisian society and the intrigues of the dying ancien régime.
Through the influence of her protectors, at the age of 15 she debuted at the Académie royale de Musique on 27 December 1782 in the title role of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide, in which she had only moderate success. At 16 Candeille made her fortepiano debut at the Concert Spirituel, where she performed a concerto by Clementi - by this time she was also already composing sonatas, romances and airs for the harpsichord and piano, some of which have recently been rediscovered. Aged 17 she debuted a concerto that she composed.
In 1797, the actress Élise Lange, old protégée and friend of Julie Candeille, married the businessman Michel Simons, himself the son of a Belgian coach-builder whom Mlle Candeille had met in Brussels in August 1796, having gone to the Belgian capital to put on her opera Catherine ou la belle fermière. Michel's father Jean Simons was not unfeeling to Candeille's charms and married her in Brussels on 11 February 1798 - she divorced Laroche and broke a theatre engagement to marry him, thus ending her theatrical career.
When war resumed at the start of the First Empire, Jean Simons' business affairs declined and his wife retired to their Parisian hôtel particulier at 3 rue Cérutti, giving piano recitals at aristocratic soirées in the French capital. She also became the beneficiary of a pension bestowed on her by the new empress Marie-Louise. Throughout her life Julie Candeille welcomed, supported and encouraged young people and other women musicians, dedicating many of her works to Hélène de Montgeroult and Pauline Duchambge.
|