Emile Joseph Trognee

15 Grandes Etudes

Emile Joseph Trognée was born on July 4, 1868 in Tirimon, Belgium. He studied trumpet at the Brussels Conservatory. After winning a pan-European competition, he was engaged as solo trumpeter and cornettist at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. (The theater is now called Kirov, and the city Leningrad.) He then spent the rest of his life in Russia and played at the Mariinskiy Theater for 25 years.



Trognée was a musician of the highest order. The famous Soviet conductor Karl Eliasberg wrote about him:



'Trognée had a unique gift for blending into the ensemble, his playing was remarkable for its precise dynamics and an unerring sense of the character of a musical phrase. His tone was never forced, but always clear, powerful and even in all registers. He was also a great master of very quiet emissions without the use of reeds. His performances in Wagner's Nibelungenring, Rienzi and Lohengrin as well as in operas by Tchaikovsky and Verdi were memorable.'



Trognée was highly esteemed by composers and conductors. He advised Rimsky-Korsakov to make various changes to the trumpet parts in his opera 'The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh' (including the well-known passage in the symphonic picture 'The Battle of Kerzhenets').



Trognée taught at the Baltic Music School from 1911-1917 and at the Leningrad Special Music School 'Rimsky-Korsakov' from 1928-1941. He composed various works for trumpet and cornet. His 'Fantasia-Caprice', which is printed in Tabakov's Progressive Elementary School for Trumpet (published in Moscow in 1946), was very popular for a long time. His 'Trumpet Studies', dedicated to Tabakov (published in 1932 by the state publishing house Triton), are also well known. The etudes presented here were composed at various times, but were never published during Trognée's lifetime. After his death in Leningrad in 1942, they were collected by the Soviet trumpeter, composer and teacher Sergey Bolotin. The following edition of Trognée's etudes gives us the opportunity to study the work of one of the great fathers of the Russian school - such as Wassili Wurm, Wassili Brandt and Oskar Böhme.

Anatoli Selianin