Was André Mathieu the Canadian Mozart? Or was he just a precocious and exceptionally talented pianist and composer who might have become a genius as an adult if he had lived up to the expectations he raised as a child prodigy? Alas, he died at 39, a destitute alcoholic. His tragic life was bound to end up on the screen, and it did. L'enfant prodige ( The Child Prodigy) opened last week in Montreal, and it will probably be one of the year's most popular movies in Quebec - and with English subtitles, who knows, maybe in the rest of Canada too.
He is reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century, who stopped writing at 20 and died a drug addict at 37 after a nomadic life as a small-time dealer of coffee and arms.
Mr. Mathieu, the son of a professional pianist, was born in Montreal in 1929. At 4, he was composing music on the family piano. At 6, he gave a recital in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton hotel and performed as a soloist his Concertino No. 1 on the CBC. At 7, with a grant from the Quebec government, he was studying piano and composition in Paris, where he gave two recitals of his own works that were acclaimed by critics and Rachmaninoff himself. At 13, he won the New York Philharmonic's first prize for composition in a competition for young composers. At 18, one of his compositions - the Concerto de Québec - was used in the sound track of a successful film, La Forteresse.
Then things went downhill.
Like Rimbaud, he had become an alcoholic, an addiction reinforced by a feeling of rejection when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra refused to play his work. In the 1950s, he started doing what was called "pianothons," playing his compositions for record lengths of time - sometimes for as long as 12 hours non-stop. He needed the money and the alcohol it paid for. He died in 1968, lonely and ignored.
For quite a few years, Mr. Mathieu's rehabilitation was the lonely mission of Alain Lefèvre, a wonderful pianist with an international reputation (he was guest star at the opening ceremony of the Canadian pavilion in the Shanghai International Exhibition). For years, Mr. Lefèvre took it upon himself to exhume memories of the forgotten composer. He recorded Mr. Mathieu's most interesting concertos, and then things began to pick up. George Nicholson, a writer and a music lover, published a Mathieu biography and Denise Robert, one of Quebec's most enterprising movie producers, hired well-known director Luc Dionne to make the biopic with some of Quebec's best actors.
A biopic it is indeed, and a conventional one to boot, complained La Presse film critic Marc Cassivi, although he loved the film's music. A totally different point of view was offered in the same newspaper by veteran music critic Claude Gingras, who loved the film - he was close to tears at the end - but was skeptical about Mr. Mathieu's real value as a composer.
"The best music in the movie is that of Mahler and Rachmaninoff," Mr. Mathieu's major inspirations, he wrote bluntly. "A few measures of the Concerto de Québec is the only interesting theme that came from Mr. Mathieu's pen, although this theme sounds quite like Rachmaninoff! Mr. Mathieu's music is not without value. It will please the public at large. But if Mathieu is a genius, then we'll have to invent a new word for Bach, Mozart and Beethoven."
What is certain is that notwithstanding the judgment of the most demanding film and music critics, a touching and unusual story infused with lovely neo-romantic classical music will most probably be a crowd-pleaser.
Lysiane Gagnon