Teaching the Flute

Abstract While Taffanel was discussing the details of his biography with Hugues Imbert on 3 June 1893, his career was about to take yet another new turn. That same day Henri Altès tendered his formal resignation as professor of flute at the Conservatoire. He was sixty-seven and in rapidly failing health. “I have no strength even to come to the Conservatoire to carry out the examination of my students,” he wrote in a personal letter soon after to the director, Ambroise Thomas, and he enclosed a written report and suggested that the concours piece for that summer should be Tulou’s Fourth Solo.1 No doubt as a compliment to Altès, the set piece was changed to his own Eighth Solo. Altès died just over two years later on 24 July 1895 in a Paris nursing home, leaving as next of kin only his younger brother, the conductor Ernest Altès. October came, and with a new academic year approaching, a replacement flute professor had to be found at the Conservatoire. A sheet of paper preserved in the archives lists the candidates: “Cantié, Hennebains, de Vroye, Donjon, Bertram,” with their dates of birth and the year when each one had gained a premier prix.