Hyacinthe Jadin
Born: 1776Died: 1800
Education: self-taught
Career: composer
He was a French composer who came from a distinguished musical family. His uncle Georges Jadin was a composer in Versailles and Paris, along with his father Jean Jadin, who had also played bassoon for the French Royal Orchestra. He was one of five musically gifted brothers, the most famous of which was Louis-Emmanuel Jadin. Jadin was born in Versailles. He was a pupil of Nicolas Joseph Hullmandel, who belonged to the famous ecole des Pianistes Parisiens (School of Pianists in Paris). Hullmandel himself was a student of C.P.E. Bach, and was an excellent teacher who brought out Jadin's pianistic brilliance. At the age of 9, Jadin's first composition, a Rondo for piano, was published in the Journal de Clavecin. By the age of thirteen, Jadin had premiered his first work with the Concert Spirituel. The times in which Jadin lived dictated to a large degree his chance at musical greatness. In 1789, the same year of his public performance premiere, the French Revolution broke out. The Revolution provided some work for Jadin, as the demand for theatre and music that reflected the values of the Revolution increased. He took a job in 1792 as assistant rehearsal pianist (Rezizativbegleiter) at the Theatre Feydeau. In this year he composed the Marche du siege de Lille ("March of the Siege of Lille"), commemorating the successful resistance of the citizens of Lille when besieged by Austrian forces, a highly publicised event at the time. In 1794, after Robespierre's Great Terror claimed the life of Jean-Frederic Edelmann, another member of the ecole des Pianistes Parisiens, Hullmandel fled France, leaving Jadin behind. In the same year, Jadin published an overture for 13 wind instruments entitled Hymn to the 21st of January. The piece commemorated the one-year anniversary of the execution of Citizen Capet (the name given to Louis XVI during his trial for treason). In 1795, he began teaching a female piano class at the Paris Conservatoire. From 1795 to 1800, Jadin was plagued by tuberculosis. His sickness was serious enough that Napoleon Bonaparte himself excused Jadin from military service. Similar to how the French Revolution presented an inevitable obstacle to Jadin's musical greatness, the state of medicine in the late 18th century prevented him from living long enough to have as profound an impact on music as he otherwise could have. Tuberculosis at this time was almost a certain death sentence, and he gave his last public concert on September 22, 1799, before dying the following year, in Paris. At the time of his death, he was impoverished – still owed several months' salary by the Paris conservatory – another consequence of the constant political unrest that marked the place and time in which he lived.