Oddlet: Charles-Valentin Alkan · 1 min read
Jul 31, 2026
The Composer Found Under His Coat Stand
What does a man do for twenty-five years after walking offstage at the Paris Conservatoire in disgust?
Charles-Valentin Alkan was, by 1848, the obvious next professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. The job went to Antoine Marmontel. Alkan called it "the most incredible, the most shameful nomination," walked off the stage, and stayed off it for roughly twenty-five years.
He did not, however, stop working. Inside two adjoining apartments on the rue Daru, rented in pairs so no neighbour's noise could reach him, he wrote a Symphony for Solo Piano and a Concerto for Solo Piano, hiding both inside his Op. 39 études. The Concerto's first movement runs seventy-two pages. One pianist plays the orchestra and the soloist at once.
During the same long silence he set about translating the entire Old Testament, the entire New Testament, and the Apocrypha into French from the Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac. In 1865 he wrote to Hiller that he had moved on to the second Gospel. The manuscript ran to years of his life and is lost. What survives is one psalm, tucked inside a piece of music.
For almost a century the story went that this man, this scholar-recluse, died reaching for a volume of the Talmud when his bookcase came down on him. In 1973 Hugh Macdonald found a pupil's letter.
He was on the kitchen floor, pinned under a fallen coat stand.
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- Wikipedia – Charles-Valentin Alkan — Comprehensive biography citing Hugh Macdonald's research. Source for birth/death dates, family details, Conservatoire prizes, Square d'Orléans residence, Chopin's bequest, the 1848 Marmontel appointment, Op. 39 contents and Concerto for Solo Piano duration, Bible translation work, Delaborde, and the kitchen / porte-parapluie account of his death.
- New World Encyclopedia – Charles Valentin Alkan — Confirms the Hugh Macdonald revision of the death story (porte-parapluie, not bookcase), Op. 39 contents, the Chopin friendship, Delaborde as illegitimate son, and the lost Bible translation.
- Musicologie.org – Alkan biographical page (French) — Primary source for the 29 rue Daru address (two adjoining apartments), the firsthand account of his being found 'étendu et inanimé dans sa cuisine, devant son fourneau' (unconscious in his kitchen before his stove), his fastidious food/butter habits, his black tailcoat/top hat dress, and his rigid 10 PM departure rule.
- The Forward – Celebrating 200 Years of French-Jewish Composer Charles Valentin-Alkan — Source for Jewish identity, Hebrew/Aramaic fluency, the ~30 years he spent translating the Bible, burial in the Jewish section of Montmartre, the Isidor Philipp origin of the bookcase legend, and the loss to Marmontel for the Conservatoire post.
- Classical-Music.com – Charles-Valentin Alkan: composer, hermit, influential Romantic
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