Three generations of the Lambert family made their mark in classical music.
Charles-Richard Lambert was an internationally acclaimed musician and a conductor for the integrated Philharmonic Society, founded by free people of color in New Orleans in 1830.
Born in New York in 1800, Lambert moved to New Orleans and married a free woman of color. The couple had a son named Charles Lucièn in 18928. After his first wife died, Lambert remarried. His second son, Sidney, was born in 1838.
As a music teacher, Lambert taught his sons piano and taught music theory to Edmond Dédé, a classical violinist and composer. Lambert died in 1862 while performing in Haiti.
Following in their father’s footsteps, Charles Lucièn and Sidney became successful pianists, composers and music educators in New Orleans and abroad.
“Despite his promise as a young musician,” Black Past states, “Charles Lucièn eventually had to find work outside the United States because of hostility toward mixed-race Creoles and Black people in antebellum New Orleans.”
He moved to France in 1853, married a French woman and had a son, Lucièn-Léon Guillaume in 1858. A couple of years later, he moved his family to Brazil. Charles Lucièn died in Rio de Janeiro in 1896. Sidney died in Paris in 1905.
According to Black Past, Lucièn-Léon Guillaume returned to Paris in the mid-1870s to study music. He began composing music at 8 years old. At 11, he performed at a concert in Brazil “in which 31 pianists played simultaneously.”
In 1905, Lucièn-Léon Guillaume recorded one of his compositions, and “is believed to be the first African-ancestored classical music composer whose music was recorded,” Black Past states. Today, his compositions, which include ballet, symphonic poems, a piano concerto and a requiem, are preserved at the French National Library.
Lucièn-Léon Guillaume died in Paris in 1945.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.