If you are driving to Brattleboro from Marlboro and make a right turn off Western Avenue, just after the covered bridge, you’ll come to the baseball field of Memorial Park. Go a few yards further and, on the left, there’s a street sign that reads Blanche Moyse Way.
The sign has double meaning—it honors a unique and beloved figure in Brattleboro’s cultural life, one of Marlboro Music’s founders, and, coincidentally, it affirms that Blanche Honegger Moyse had exacting standards that, happily, required doing things her ‘way.’ That meant taking your music seriously, probing the depths of the music that you played or sung with both sensitivity and passion. She brought those qualities to all she did at Marlboro, in Brattleboro, and for the music of J.S. Bach, for which she became acclaimed as a devoted interpreter.
Her generosity extended to Marlboro’s Monday night dinners when, in the early 1960s, one of the summer’s highlights was always the cheese fondue dinner that Blanche and Louis Moyse would make for our community. For most of us, it was our first experience with this rather exotic dish, which pre-dated our International Dinner and its many different delicacies from around the world. The Moyses made theirs with kirsch and served it with white wine, making for a rather potent combination. Their most memorable fondue dinner was when they made it for the visit of the Queen Mother of Belgium, a friend of Pablo Casals and the founder of the prestigious competition that bears her name. By chance, two winners of that Competition—Leon Fleisher and Jaime Laredo—were at Marlboro and joined our royal guest, the Moyses, and the Serkins at her table.
Active into her 90s (she died in 2011 at 101), Blanche Moyse changed the cultural life of Brattleboro forever when she created the Brattleboro Music Center with a music school, community choir, and concert series that remains a valued civic jewel and a tribute to Blanche Moyse and her tireless efforts to illuminate local life with her joy in music. Her performances of Bach Cantatas at Marlboro for 44 years and at her autumn New England Bach Festival became memorable musical experiences for audiences and performers alike. She took her Blanche Moyse Chorale to New York to perform with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, making her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 78 in a performance that the New York Times proclaimed “an absolutely glorious rendition of Bach’s ‘Christmas Oratorio.'”
In the early, formative years of the Marlboro Music School and Festival, concert programs found Blanche Moyse as a violinist in the Moyse Trio with her husband, flutist and pianist Louis, as well as her father-in-law, flutist Marcel Moyse. She first conducted at Marlboro in 1954 in a performance of the Schubert Mass in E-flat Major with the Marlboro College Chorus, Brattleboro Community Chorus, and Marlboro Orchestra. With the same forces, she conducted the Brahms Requiem the following year and the Fauré Requiem Mass in 1956, when she also led a performance of the Mozart Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos, K. 365, with Rudolf Serkin and Claude Frank. It was in 1957 that she first conducted a Bach Cantata—No. 105: Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht, laying the groundwork for a tradition which would offer annual Bach Cantata concerts from 1959 through 2003. Not only did she give us new perspectives on some of the most moving music ever written, but she offered us the opportunity to hear many cantatas that are rarely performed. It was a great gift.
For Marlboro’s singers as well as the woodwinds players, the inspiring experience of exploring Bach’s music with Blanche Moyse was to have a lifelong impact on their approach to music. The well-known soprano Arlene Auger, who performed frequently at the New England Bach Festival, summed up the feelings of so many Marlboro participants when she said, “I’ve sung Bach all over the world, often with people who are considered the best, and in my opinion no one is performing Bach any better than Blanche Moyse is doing it in Brattleboro.”
Watch Vermont Public Television’s interview with Blanche Moyse, recorded when she was 92.
☙Use the three links below to access additional biographical and archival materials. ❧
