Cardon, Jean Baptiste

Jean Baptiste Cardon ( fr. Jean-Baptiste Cardon ; 1760 , Rethel - March 11, 1803 , St. Petersburg ) is a French harpist and composer , most of his life in the Russian service. The son of the violinist and composer Jean Guillen Cardon ; his brother Louis Stanislas Cardon (1761-1797) was also a violinist and composer.

From 1780 he performed in Paris as a harp virtuoso - initially as the court musician of the Countess d'Artois, to whom his four sonatas for the harp Op. 1. In 1785, toured in London . With the development of the revolutionary events in France in 1790, he went to Russia, where for 12 years he was a court harpist and music teacher. Cardon’s chamber music making partners included leading Western performers working in Russia: Ernest Vanjur , Anton Ferdinand Tits , Johann Josef Behr, and others. In addition to solo harp and accompanying works (for example, Two concert symphonies for harp and string quartet. Op. Op. 18, 1787 ) left the arrangements of the popular light arias for harp accompaniment, partly included in the "Journal of Italian and other ariett with the accompaniment of the harp J.-B.Cardon" (St. Petersburg, 1797 ). In 1802, he briefly returned to Paris on personal business, then went back to Russia, but died almost immediately after his arrival.

Many years of litigation for the inheritance between the Cardona survivors and his second wife, whose marriage in Russia, French jurisprudence refused to recognize as valid, became a well-known legal precedent included in reference books ^[4] .

J.-B. Cardon. Book IV Sonatas for Harp. 1780s SPb. Private collection

There is a modern recording of the composer’s works (Irina Donskaya - harp, Marina Filippova - vocal, ImLab CD007)