Although the accordion is more and more often played by concert performers trained at the Conservatoire, like Théo Ould, in the running this year to obtain a Victory for Classical Music, it still remains, for many, an instrument from popular spheres, both musical and social. An untruth with regard to history, which saw him, in France, in the 1830s and 1840s, become the darling of young girls of the aristocracy, some of royal blood.
Rare are the testimonies of this golden age of the ” accordion (the name under which the invention was registered, in Vienna, in 1829), as precious in the decoration of the bellows (painted, like the covers of harpsichords in the past) as in the design of the keyboards (mother-of-pearl keys, rockers of harmony in silver) and the composition of the models (rosewood, palisander, tortoiseshell).
Very early passionate about the origins of the instrument that he himself transcended in all latitudes, Marcel Azzola (1927-2019) built up a collection of a richness to make any museum green with envy. . A small part of this set of more than two hundred pieces covering approximately one hundred and fifty years of European violin making is the subject of an exhibition in Villennes-sur-Seine (Yvelines), before traveling around France.
Concertina and harmonica
You can admire there the creations of Fourneaux and Reisner, which are on the accordion of the XIXe century what Pleyel and Erard are to the piano of the same period. The scenography, designed by Jean-Philippe Lajus, is fluid and engaging. The instruments reign there in an environment dedicated to them in a renewed light. Posters, captions with QR codes and even sound documents (to be listened to on old-fashioned record players) which allow the deceased collector to “lead the way” with his inimitable talent as a “Parisian” storyteller and to recount, between others, which earned him the famous exclamation “Heat up, Marcel! »launched by Jacques Brel during the recording of Vesoul.
Photographs, signed Aurélie Vandenweghe, also contribute to the extension of the route. Whether they are attached to a detail (the fold of a bellows ready to reveal its secrets) or whether they sketch a perspective (keys frozen in a strange attention-to-you), the images suggest that these “inanimate objects” do have a soul… and that the accordion was not born by chance during the romantic era.
From the concertina (the “clown accordion”) to the harmonica (a cylindrical example!), his parents have not been forgotten. All these instruments remained for a long time in the suitcases that Marcel Azzola put down in Villennes-sur-Seine, in 1985, without however ceasing to travel the world. Revealing them to the public not far from the cemetery where he rests has symbolic value. Especially since it is envisaged that the street where the great accordionist lived could soon bear his name.
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