Adrien de La Fage
Adrien de La Fage, born Juste Adrien Lenoir, was a French musicologist, source scholar, composer, and writer about music and musicians. He was born in Paris on March 28, 1801, and died in Saint-Maurice on March 8, 1862.
He received his initial musical education at the school attached to the Church of Saint Philip of the Roule in Paris, where he also sang in the choir. His family intended him for the Catholic priesthood, so he studied at the seminary of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Chardonnet, where he learned the classical languages. He abandoned the ecclesiastical career and entered the Paris Conservatory, studying there until 1828 in the classes of Alexandre Choron and François Perne.
In 1828, La Fage received a royal grant and went to Italy for compositional training with Giuseppe Baini. He returned to Paris in 1829 and served until 1833 as choir director at the Church of Saint Stephen of the Mount.
La Fage moved to Italy with his family in 1833; his wife and son died there after a brief illness. He returned to France in 1836 and devoted himself mainly to the history of music and the musical scholarship of the Middle Ages. In 1859, he founded and directed the periodical Plainchant, which published articles, including his own, on church music.
Exhaustion caused by his scholarly and administrative work led to a nervous illness. He was eventually placed in the Charenton psychiatric clinic near Paris, now called Esquirol Hospital.
La Fage's extensive scholarly output includes Essays in Musical Dipterography, published posthumously in 1864. The book combines codicological descriptions of musical and music-theoretical manuscripts with fragments of previously unknown writings about music from different periods and styles. It remained relevant throughout the twentieth century and has continued to be consulted in the twenty-first, partly because La Fage often relied on manuscripts that have since been lost. Some early texts published in his anthology still have not received critical re-editions.
His other works include the scholarly monograph Musical Semiology (1837) and General History of Music and Dance, whose two volumes, published in 1841 and 1844, address ancient Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and Jewish music. He also wrote an extensive 872-page treatise on Gregorian chant, published in 1855, with an appendix issued in 1856 that contained several of his own polyphonic arrangements of chants. La Fage completed and published the musical encyclopedia begun by Choron, Complete Manual of Vocal and Instrumental Music, in eleven volumes issued from 1836 to 1838.