1827 dapplegrey
For the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, De Villiers wrote a Jubilee fantasia. De Villiers was naturally a citizen of a colony under British control, and so he honoured Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, with four occasional works on his visit to South Africa: Africa’s Welcome to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alfred’s Grand March, Prince Alfred’s Quick March and Prince Alfred’s Gallop.
Other works with a specific Afrikaans tendency were the piano piece, De Transvaalsche jager, a festival song to words by Celliers, Sestien Desember and Slaap rustig to words of Theo Jandrell. The members sang mainly sacred music, including the first performances of De Villiers’ four oratorios: De Epiphanie (1856), Zion and Babylon, De Sulamith and Maranatha.ĭev Villiers’s endeavours to advance the cause of Afrikaans music in an Afrikaans town were motivated by the same ideals as those announced by the Afrikaans Genootskap. It was essentially a choral society, whose singing was supported by organ or piano. Apart from his duties in the church, De Villiers strove to advance music in Paarl, and created the Paarl Philharmonic Society in 1864. Four of these tunes were eventually used in the Afrikaans Psalter of 1937. The influence of the church is also attested to by the 13 new tunes that De Villiers wrote in 1883 for the new hymnbook, entitled Hallelujah, psalmen and gezangen der Ned. His father-in-law supported De Villiers’ music by cooperating in the writing of a text for an oratorio, and by arranging for a performance of De Villier’s Philharmonic Society before the Dutch Reformed Church Synod. This marriage into a minister’s family greatly influenced his career. Van der Lingen, Johanna, who was his pupil for seven years before becoming his wife. In order to reach his pupils, he used to ride his dapple-grey horse to their homes.
When he was 18, Jan Stephanus de Villiers gave two concerts in Cape Town, in which he performed several of his own compositions.ĭe Villiers also taught music. However, he also had piano, violin, harp and theory lessons. Jan’s tuition was then entrusted to Frederick Logier, with organ as his main instrument. His father declined the offer because his son was still so young. Sir George Napier, the Cape Governor, offered to send the boy to Europe at his own expense in order to study music (after January 1838). Soon he was included in the lessons, and overtook his mother. As a small boy, Jan often attended his mother’s organ lessons from the Paarl organist Pieter Hugo. Jan Stephanus was the eldest son of a Paarl blacksmith and wainwright, directly descended from the Huguenots on both sides of his family.