2 Waltzes: Opus 39 No. 10 – Opus 39 No. 11

The Anacrouse collection offers pianists, beginners and advanced alike, a wide choice of classical works from the Renaissance to the present day. It brings together major works of the repertoire as well as rarer pieces, and also offers transcriptions for piano solo or four hands, selected for their musical and educational interest. Each score, available individually, benefits from careful editorial work: a rigorously established musical text, clear and legible engraving, accompanied by a short biography of the composer and a note on the work.

The piece “Souvenirs d’enfance” invites the pianist to explore Félicien David’s sound world through rhythms marked by surprising bass lines, characteristic of a style conveying the power of Oriental charms. The work consists in making a melody sing as the guiding thread of an inner narrative, calling for sensitivity to nuance and an atmosphere steeped in gentleness.

If the Anacrouse collection offers this work today, it is to recall the forgotten history of the Ménilmontant community and the constrained path of Félicien David (1810-1876). Following the tragic end of this political and spiritual movement, the composer, then aged 23, went into exile in Egypt on a two-year initiatory quest. Taken from the collection “Brises d’Orient”, this piece is a true private diary in which the mature man mirrors his youthful memories of the West with his distant discoveries. Bringing these pages back to life means rescuing from oblivion a major figure of 19th-century Orientalism whose original trajectory was broken by history.