Introduction

Abstract Amazingly, it arrived. Someone in the Paris postal service was able to supply the precise address — 8 avenue Gourgaud — and scribble it on the envelope. Fame indeed! By that date, the day after his fifty-second birthday, Paul Taffanel was a renowned public figure: not only professor of flute at the Paris Conservatoire but also chief conductor of both the Opéra and the Société des concerts du Conservatoire. As both flutist and conductor he had recently taken part in the golden jubilee concert of his great friend Camille Saint-Saëns. In particular, he had played the piece that for so many years he had made his own: Saint-Saëns’s lyrical Romance for flute.