Huguette Dreyfus

Pauline Huguette Dreyfus (30 November 1928 – 16 May 2016) was a French harpsichordist.

Biography

Dreyfus was born in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, on 30 November 1928 to Fernand and Marguerite Dreyfus. The doctor incorrectly wrote Pauline Huguette on the birth certificate; it should have been Huguette Pauline. She was always known by the name of Huguette. At age 4, she began piano lessons. With her cousin Nicole (later a famous lawyer), and also her older brother Pierre, she played duets and improvised, still a child. Her family was well off, her father an industrialist with factories in Mulhouse and Vichy. (3)

After WWII was declared, Jewish families were evacuated from the Alsace region. The Dreyfus family went to Vichy, where young Huguette enrolled in the Clermont-Ferrand conservatory under a pseudonym, finishing her studies with a first prize in piano. She must have taken on students then, as she said later that she had started teaching at age 14. In December 1942, she and her family escaped into Switzerland, settling in Lausanne where they had relatives. There she enrolled in the Conservatory of Lausanne where she pursued piano studies at a superior level until the end of the war.

In 1945, she began working with renowned piano teacher Lazare Lévy at the Ecole Normale de Paris, where she studied solfège and counterpoint. In 1949, having learned that music historian Norbert Dufourcq was to give special classes on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (in recognition of the bicentennial of Bach's death) at the Conservatoire de Paris, she entered into the class and remained there for four years. From 1953 to 1958, she studied the harpsichord at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena from mid-July to mid-September with Ruggero Gerlin, who had been a student and disciple of the renowned harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.

She died in 2016 in Paris.