Pre-Romantic piece by a Swiss pen

Around 1820, Swiss composer and pianist Caroline Boissier-Butini wrote her Sonatine 1a dedicated to Mlle Valérie Boissier. With six concertos and three piano sonatas to her credit, as well as numerous pieces for various chamber music ensembles, this experienced musician turned her attention to her daughter Valérie (1813-1893, the future social reformer and writer Madame de Gasparin), whose musical and pianistic education she provided alone. In 1831 and 1832, Valérie completed her training with performance lessons from Franz Liszt. By the age of five, the child was already playing the piano. We know that her mother wrote a series of "exercises" for the instrument. However, the Sonatine dedicated to her daughter is the only pedagogical piece to have been found in autograph manuscript. Clearly intended to train the expression of certain pianistic turns of phrase, it is a sonatina in the Mozartian sense of "short, easy sonata for beginners". Its length of 42 bars corresponds to the short pieces published by Johann Nepomuk Hummel in 1827 in his method entitled Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel.

The piece has been published by Müller & Schade, on the initiative of the Caroline Boissier-Butini Association, which wishes to enrich the pedagogical repertoire with a pre-romantic piece by a Swiss composer. As far as we know, the Sonatine 1a dedicated to Mlle Valérie Boissier is one of the earliest agility exercises for piano by a Swiss composer, and one of the first to be published. The score comes with an introduction introducing the two protagonists - mother and daughter - and a critical edition report.

Caroline Boissier-Butini (1786-1836), Sonatine 1a dedicated to Mlle Valérie Boissier for piano, M&S 2577, Fr. 13.00, Müller & Schade, Bern 2019