Romain Rolland and Ernest Bloch

Abstract

ROMAIN ROLLAND, author, critic, essayist, musicologist, and teacher, was born on January 29, 1866, to a middle-class Catholic family in Clamecy, in the Burgundy region of France. His father, a lawyer, was a highly respected member of the community; his mother, an especially pious woman, devoted herself exclusively to her two children, Romain and his sister Madeleine, a situation that inevitably made it difficult for him to cut the umbilical cord. Such was the strength of her personality and the impact it made on her son that several sources insist that Rolland was raised by his widowed mother. Except for the fact that he was a sickly child (a condition that resulted in theperpetual fear that he would not live to see the completion of each work he undertook), his childhood was peaceful and uneventful. However, differences in the backgrounds of his parents communicated themselves to the son and remained irreconcilable. Rolland's father descended from sons of the Revolution. From him, Rolland inherited his love of freedom. From his mother's family, he acquired a piety and a deep and abiding faith that did not always blend with his revolutionary spirit. He studied the piano first with his mother and music soon became an all-consuming love. When the time arrived for Rolland to enter the Ecole Normale, his mother moved the entire family to Paris.'