Martin-Joseph Mengal
(Ghent, 27 January 1784 – Ghent, 4 July 1851)

Martin-Joseph Mengal – commonly called Mengal ‘ainé’ to distinguish him from his younger brother Jean-Baptiste, who was also a horn player – got his first music lessons from his father, who was horn soloist of the Ghent opera. At the age of twelve he publicly performed violin concertos and in the Ghent opera orchestra one year later he already played the horn, the instrument he would finally prefer. Around that same age he wrote his first compositions, virtually instinctively, without a thorough knowledge of harmony.

In 1804 he went to the Conservatoire impériale in Paris to study horn with Frédéric Duvernoy and harmony and counterpoint with Charles-Simon Catel. As a

conscript of the French state Mengal was drafted in the Garde impériale in December 1804, a corps that mainly consisted of conservatory students. With this corps d’élite he moved through Italy, Austria and Prussia and witnessed the battles near Austerlitz and Jena. The Garde also called in at musical centres such as Milan, Munich, Berlin and Vienna, which enabled Mengal to gain a broader and more in-depth musical knowledge.

In between the assignments the corps returned to Paris, so he managed as best he could to carry on with his musical studies. In 1807 Mengal got his ‘congé’ and two years later he obtained his first prize for horn. As ‘premier cor’ he joined the Théâtre Odéon and in 1812 the Opéra Comique (then at the Salle Feydeau). Concurrently he studied composition with Antoine Reicha, the results of which might already be heard in his

‘opéra-comique’ Une nuit au château, a one-act created on 5 August 1818 in the Théâtre Feydeau, and subsequently L’ile de Babilary (1819) and Les infidèles (1823).
In those years Mengal also composed quite a lot of symphonic wind band music for the military, concertante symphonies with wind instruments, chamber music and romances. His romance Le chevalier errant was even ‘en vogue’ throughout Europe for a while. But most of all he composed music for his own instrument, in multiple combinations. Works that appeared with diverse Parisian publishers include two horn concertos, duets for horn and harp, duets and fantasias for horn and piano, as well as quartets for woodwinds. His three quartets for flute, clarinet, horn and bassoon op.19 were published by Bochsa in Paris in 1816.

The fact that after Les infidèles in the French capital Mengal failed to get new

opportunities as an opera composer undoubtedly contributed to his decision to return to Ghent in 1824. In the season 1825-1826 he succeeded Charles-Louis Hanssens ‘l’ainé’ as director-conductor of the Ghent opera. During that first season he programmed a revised version of Les infidèles and created his fourth opera, Le vampire. The next season he resigned as director but continued as conductor.

After the Ghent opera closed down in the aftermath of the Belgian revolution of 1830, Mengal was conductor at the Théâtre français in Antwerp for some time. In 1833 he got appointed by the Royal Theatre of The Hague, where in 1834 his opera Le retour au foyer was created.

One year later Mengal became the first director of the Ghent conservatory. There he combined his directorship with teaching