It’s the stuff of dreams: a treasure-trove of music in a family attic, revealing an ancestor who not only composed but had been a pupil of Chopin. It’s even more of a dream when the family is the Rothschilds and the eager researcher a singer herself.
It was by chance that the soprano Charlotte de Rothschild first stumbled upon the music of her indomitable great-grandmother, Mathilde de (or von) Rothschild. “I was listening to BBC Radio Three one afternoon and I heard a very beautiful song,” Charlotte recounts. “When the announcer said, ‘That was Les Papillons by Mathilde de Rothschild’, I couldn’t believe my ears. Here I was, trying to make a profession of singing, and I didn’t even know that I had an ancestor who wrote wonderful songs.” There is a chance to hear some of Mathilde’s music in the JMI Fundraising Gala next week at which Charlotte is speaking about her philanthropist uncle, Leo de Rothschild.
Charlotte soon tracked down a cousin who had found boxes of Mathilde’s music in the attic. ‘Just a few days later, I had a call asking me to give a concert for the JMI at Gunnersbury, which had been my great-grandfather’s house.’ It was the perfect opportunity to begin researching her ancestor’s music, and that of her associates, in order to create a very personal concert programme.
Her hunt for material came to a head when an autograph book turned up: started by Mathilde’s mother, a passionate music-lover also named Charlotte de Rothschild, it had passed down the generations, amassing 82 pieces, handwritten by composers including Chopin, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and many more. The family called it the livre d’or’ (Golden Book). The elderly widower of Mathilde’s late granddaughter had brought it to Paris. “I went over to meet him,” says Charlotte, “and photocopied it all.” He died shortly afterwards; Charlotte later heard, to her horror, that his carer had burnt the book. Now, about ten years after the initial discovery, Charlotte has performed her resulting Family Connections concert many times over.
Mathilde was born in Frankfurt in 1832 to Anselm and Charlotte de Rothschild, cousins from different branches of the banking family whose business flourished in five European centres. Aged 16-17, visiting cousins in Paris, she had some lessons from Fryderyk Chopin; he was suffering his last illness, but made an effort to hear “the Rothschild girl” because she was so gifted. A cousin described her at 13: “When at the piano she is quite inspired; she is really imbued with the fire and soul of music.”
She grew up surrounded by the crème-de-la-crème of musical luminaries. Charlotte found a letter in the archive describing Franz Liszt performing with a violinist: “All eyes were on him, because, the letter says, he would turn his wild eyes to the audience and toss his hair back, as if to say, ‘Am I not wonderful?’”
Aged 17, Mathilde married Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, her cousin from Naples, and adopted a strictly Orthodox Jewish lifestyle in accordance with his practices. They would never ride or drive on Shabbat and rigorously kept kosher — one story goes that Mathilde once attended a dinner given by the Kaiser, but ate not a crumb. Besides undertaking large amounts of philanthropic work, she continued composing for the rest of her life; on her death in 1924, aged 92, she left a sizeable legacy of art-songs and piano pieces. Her best-known work is the Romance ‘Si vous n’avez rien à me dire’, written in 1905 for the soprano Adelina Patti.
Charlotte’s own career has been unconventional. She had just been accepted for the Glyndebourne chorus when her mother’s death plunged her into family commitments that obliged her to put her life as a singer on hold. Later, she made up for lost time: performing around the world, she has sung in 23 languages and says she always introduces her programmes in the local tongue. “My next challenge is Scottish Gaelic,” she says. Her recordings with the pianist Adrian Farmer range from a French album of Fauré, Dupont and Hahn to some rare and beautiful Japanese repertoire. The latest is a four-CD set of 107 songs by the English composer Cecil Armstrong Gibbs.
As for Mathilde, she was emphatically not one of the 19th-century female composers who capitulated to families’ demands that they must not publish their work. On the contrary, her music was issued by the best houses and her songs recorded by renowned opera stars. Her photographs show a woman of formidable determination. Charlotte puts it succinctly: “She was a Rothschild.”

Charlotte de Rothschild and Adrian Farmer’s albums are out now on the Nimbus label. Charlotte de Rothschild is speaking at the Jewish Music Institute’s Fundraising Gala on March 10.
jmi.org.uk/event/jmi-celebration-2022