30 Etudes mélodiques

Emile Joseph Trognée was born in Tirimon, in Belgium, on 4th of July 1868. He studied trumpet at the Brussels Conservatoire. After winning a European competition in 1902, he became solo trumpet and cornet at the Mariinskiy opera theatre in St. Petersburg (the theatre is now the Kirov and the city is now Leningrad). He spent the rest of his life in Russia, working at the Mariinskiy for 25 years.

Trognée was an outstanding musician. A weil known Soviet conductor, Karl Eliasberg, wrote: 'Trognée had a unique feeling of ensemble; his playing was remarkable for accurate dynamics and for an infallible sensitivity towards the meaning and character of the musical phrase. His sound was never forced but always bright, powerful and even in ail registers. He was also a great master of very soft sound production (without-using the tongue). He was noted for his performances of Wagner' s 'Ring of the Nibelun'gen', 'Rienzi' and 'Lohengrin' and of operas by Tchaikovsky and Verdi.'

Trognée was recognised by both performers and composers. He advised RimskyKorsakov to make some changes in the trumpet parts of his opera 'The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh' (the weil known difficult trumpet phrase in the symphonic picture 'The Battle at Kerzhenets').

He taught at the Baltic Fleet music school from 1911 to 1917 and at the Leningrad 'Rimsky-Korsakov' special music school from 1928 to 1941.
He wrote several works for trumpet and cornet. His 'Fantasia-Caprice', which appeared in Tabakov's 'Elementary Progressive Trumpet Tu-tor', published in Moscow in 1946, was especially popular for many years. His 'Studies for Trumpet', published in Leningrad by the state publisher Triton in 1932 and dedicated to Tabakov, are also weil known. The studies presented in this edition were written at various times but not published during Trognée's lifetime. After his death in Leningrad in 1942 they were preserved by the Soviet trumpeter, composer and teacher Sergey Bolotin.

This edition of Trognée' s studies gives us an opportunity to study the work of someone who, like Vasiliy Wurm, Vasiliy Brandt and Oskar Böhme, made a great contribution to the history of the trumpet in Russia.
Anatoly Selyanin