Rodolphe d'Erlanger

Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger (b. Boulogne-Billancourt, France, June 7, 1872; d. Tunis, October 29, 1932) was a French painter and musicologist specializing in Arabic music.

Self-portrait at Ennejma Ezzahra Museum
Ennejma Ezzahra Palace at Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunis

Life

Baron d'Erlanger was the fourth son of German-French private banker Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger and his American wife Marguerite Mathilde Slidell (1842–1927), daughter of businessman and politician John Slidell. His eldest brother Raphael Slidell d'Erlanger (1865–1897) was a zoologist and professor at Heidelberg. The second brother was Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger (1866–1939) who took over the bank's management. His third brother Baron Frédéric Alfred d'Erlanger (1868–1943) also became a banker, but acquired acclaim as a composer as well. (See: Erlanger family tree).

Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger studied in Paris and London. He later wrote the six-volume work, La Musique Arabe (1930-1959). He helped to organize the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music,[1] the idea of which he had suggested to king Fuad I of Egypt. Although he was too ill to attend and died soon after, he sent an ensemble from Tunisia to perform in Cairo at the Congress. He is also known for his six-volume work about the history of Arabic music.

His palace at Sidi Bou Said, in northern Tunisia, which he named Ennejma Ezzahra (sometimes spelled Nejma Ezzohara), was built between 1909 and 1921.[2] The building is now a museum and houses the Centre des musiques arabes et méditerranéennes. He helped to revive the musical genre known as ma'luf during the 1920s.

He married the Italian countess Maria Elisabetta Barbiellini-Amidei. Their only son, Leo Alfred Frédéric d'Erlanger (1898–1978), eventually became the head of the family-owned bank which however he sold to Philip Hill Higginson Ltd. and its chairing partner Kenneth Keith, later Baron Keith of Castleacre, in 1958. The bank then became Philip Hill Higginson Erlanger Ltd., until a further fusion with M Samuel, then named Hill, Samuel & Co.

Further reading
  • Davis, Ruth (1997). "Traditional Arab Music Ensembles in Tunis: Modernizing Al-Turath in the Shadow of Egypt. Asian Music, v. 28, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 73–108.
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References
  1. Haclef, A. (1993). "Mohamed Ben Hassan et Mohamed Cherif. La Musique Classique Tunisienne Congres du Caire 1932 Malouf (Tunisie)". Bolingo. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  2. Cowell, Alan (1987-07-23). "In Tunisia, A Rare Visit To a Palace And Its Owner". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-05.


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