Folz, Michel: Caprice-Etude, for Flute and Piano (With Part)

Composer(s)

Michel Folz: the international life and career of the flutist Michel Folz exemplifies the increasingly global life of the traveling virtuoso in the nineteenth century, once all of Europe had been linked by rail transportation. He began his career as a member of a Neapolitan with at least four flute-playing siblings of a flutist father. The later edition of the Fétis Biographie includes a relatively brief biography for a musician whose success is well-documented by notices in the press spanning fifty years.

Fétis writes:

FOLZ (michel), flutist and composer for his instrument was born in Naples, to Italian parents, on July 16, 1820. A student of his father, likewise a flutist, he made his public debut while still a child, and by the age of eight he had already performed two hundred concerts [later sources translate this as concertos, but this is certainly an incorrect interpretation] in the principal cities of Italy. At ten, he was engaged by the orchestra of the Teatro del Fondo, in Naples; at the age of seventeen he came to Paris, and was received in the competition as the first flutist at the Musical Gymnasium on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, directed by M. Tilmant[1]. A protégé of Rossini, he toured England and other countries with great success.