Van Elewyck, Xavier

Kim De Brabander (translation: Jo Sneppe)

Composer, conductor and music critic, Xavier-Victor-Fidèle van Elewyck (van Elewijck) was a scion of a noble family. He was the son of Henri-Joseph van Elewyck, lawyer at the Court of Appeal in Brussels and mayor of Elsene. His grandfather Arnold van Elewyck, lord of Stockel, had also been a law student and was a member of the Council of Brabant. On 12 December 1871 the hereditary title of ‘knight’ had been conferred on Xavier by royal decree.

As a young man Xavier van Elewyck grew up in an environment that offered him quite a lot of musical opportunities. He took private piano lessons from Laurent-François Boutmy, known as the piano teacher of one of the children of William I, and studied the violin with a M. Kim, who worked for the Monnaie Theatre. At age seven he already got the chance to demonstrate his musical talents at a concert of the ‘Société d’harmonie’ of Elsene. This society was founded by his father and proved for some years to be one of the largest in the country. At the Brussels St Michael's school he chose the humanities option and also studied composition with the Spanish Jesuit Joachim Gimeno and harmony with Charles Bosselet, both of them music teachers of this school.

As a nineteen-year-old Van Elewyck already started to compose. His first works included piano pieces (Rose d’hiver) and religious compositions (Ave verum, Ave Maris Stella).

After graduating successfully he enrolled at the university of Leuven. In his father's footsteps he opted for a study course in diplomacy. In 1849 he obtained his doctoral degree in the political and administrative sciences maxima cum laude, yet he was not cut out for a further career in this branch. He had set his heart on music, to which he would indeed devote a major part of his life. In fact already during his student days he conducted the choir of the Leuven music school (1844-1854), where he was also secretary and chairman. After his marriage to a girl from Leuven, Anne Philipinne de Busscher, he made the university city his permanent home and remained for his entire career closely associated with the music scene.

In 1859 he continued his activities as choirmaster founding the male choir ‘Société de Ste-Cécile’, with which he tried to promote appealing religious music. Until 1867 he stayed director of this society.

In 1860 van Elewyck made a remarkable appearance as a representative of the Belgian bishops at the ‘Congrès pour la restauration du plain chant et de la musique d’église’ in Paris. For an audience of no less than two hundred intellectuals from France, Belgium, England and Germany he debated about religious music in Belgium, successfully opposing the proposal to ban the orchestra from the church. Also at the congresses of the Belgian Catholics in Mechelen in 1863 and 1864 similar subjects were dealt with. There van Elewyck was co-organiser and secretary of the religious music section. He compiled and published the conference proceedings together with canon Theodore-Joseph Devroye under the title: De la musique réligieuse: les congrès de Malines (1863 et 1864) et de Paris (1860) et la législation de l'église sur cette matière.

Van Eleywck was keenly interested in Flemish music life, with a predilection for organ music. In 1862 he published a substantial study on the Belgian organist and carilloneur Matthias Van den Gheyn, entitled Matthias Van den Gheyn, le plus grand organiste et carillonneur belge du dix-huitième siècle, et les célèbres fondeurs de cloches de ce nom depuis 1450 jusqu’à nos jours. The work met with plenty of favourable reactions.

In 1868 van Elewyck became music director of St Peter's church in Leuven. Under his management the church developed into a musical centre, on Sundays and Christian holidays featuring high-quality concerts with extended choir and orchestra. Also in his spacious dwelling at the river Dijle he organised concert evenings. The year 1870 saw the solemn inauguration of the concert hall that had been constructed on van Elewyck's initiative for these occasions, with a performance by the Court's quintet. The hall counted three hundred seats and plenty of well-known composers from Belgium and abroad had concerts there, amongst them Jacques Lemmens, Alphonse Mailly, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet.

In 1875 van Elewyck was commissioned by the Belgian government to travel to Italy with a view to studying music education and the church choirs there. This resulted in the report De l’état actuel de la musique en Italie, which later also appeared in English. Music teaching was no unfamiliar study field for van Elewyck, since as a member of the Leuven ‘Section de Musique’ he investigated the Belgian official music education system, which was set up in those days. He submitted several propositions aiming at an improvement of its structure and organisation. Furthermore from 1876 to 1887 he published numerous articles on various subjects in the periodical Journal des Beaux-Arts et de la Littérature.

In 1883 van Elewyck became a corresponding member of the ‘Académie royale de Belgique’ and the city of Leuven paid public tribute to him. In addition he was a member of several foreign societies, among them the ‘Accademia di Santa Cecilia’ in Rome and the ‘Société des compositeurs de musique de France’. In 1886 he presented his ‘enregistreur musical’: an appliance connected to a clavier (piano, harmonium or organ), immediately registering what is being played. This invention, which caused him to be admitted to the royal presence, at that time made a deep impression.

Knight Xavier van Elewyck's compositions include piano works, songs, motets with organ and orchestra and quite a lot of fantasies. With his broad field of interests and his meticulous investigations he made a major contribution as a musicologist avant-la-lettre to Belgian music research, with in-depth music studies and publications on Flemish music life in the 18th century. Moreover van Elewyck left behind a valuable collection of scores, transcriptions and didactic works. The crowning glory of this collected work is his Collection d’oeuvres d’anciens et célèbres clavecinistes flamands.