Guillaume Lekeu: a Belgian composer whose life was cut short
Belgian composer Jean Joseph Nicolas Guillaume Lekeu – who went by Guillaume – had a short but prolific life in which he left his mark on Belgian classical music.
Lekeu was born in Heusy, a small town near Verviers, in the province of Liège. His family moved to Poitiers in France, however, when young Guillaume was just nine years old.
Mysteriously, Guillaume Lekeu’s location and date of birth (that is to say: Liège province in the 19th century) place him among a most remarkable group of Belgian composers that also includes Henri Vieuxtemps, César Franck and Eugène Ysaÿe.
The aforementioned Franck took the promising young composer under his wing as a student. When Franck died in 1890, young Guillaume would go on to study under French composer Vincent d’Indy, who co-founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris and was a student of Franck’s himself.
Franck was his biggest influence, though there are also hints of Beethoven and of Wagner. Of the approximately 50 pieces that Guillaume composed, numerous ones stand out, such as his Adagio pour quatuor d’orchestre, a highly-praised string orchestra piece, and his Violin Sonata, which was commissioned by Eugène Ysaÿe and is probably his most famous work.
The life of this terrific Belgian composer ended tragically early when he caught typhoid fever from a contaminated sorbet at a restaurant in Paris in October 1893. He passed away from it just a day after his 24th birthday, at his parents’ home in the French city of Angers.
Guillaume Lekeu lives on through his music, of course. He is quoted as saying “I kill myself to put all my soul into my music,” and his soul is there, in the melancholic body of work he leaves behind, a body of work that could have been many times larger were it not for the man’s untimely death.
As Lekeu died so young, he left several incomplete works behind (in the case of the cello sonata and the piano quartet, they were completed by d’Indy). Who knows what levels of mastery he might have achieved had he lived as long as his fellow Liège-area composers?