A New Golden Age for the Mandolin in Marseille

From June 30 to July 6, 2026, Mandol’in Marseille will return for a sixth edition dedicated to the French-Romanian composer Vladimir Cosma, guest of honour at a festival that explores the mandolin from the baroque era to contemporary creation, embracing cinema and amateur music-making along the way. At the helm of the festival, Vincent Beer-Demander continues a distinctive Marseille story: that of a city where, in 1921, the first French mandolin class was established at the city’s National Conservatory of Music, under the leadership of the Italian-French mandolinist Laurent Fantauzzi (1872–1941). A professor at the Conservatoire Pierre Barbizet de Marseille and the Royal Conservatory of Liège, as well as a concert performer and composer, Vincent Beer-Demander reflects on the revival of the instrument, its role in baroque music, Bach on the mandola, and the need to foster a dialogue between cultural heritage, education, creativity, and popular celebration.

What place does the mandolin occupy in baroque music?

Vincent Beer-Demander: It fully belongs there. The mandolin is part of the lute family and, from the seventeenth century onward, forms part of the broader history of plucked string instruments. The seventeenth-century singer and lutenist François de Chancy played the mandore, a related instrument and a direct ancestor of the modern mandolin. In the eighteenth century, the mandolin became highly prized among the nobility because of its elegance and graceful character. Richly decorated mandolins adorned with mother-of-pearl, silver, gold, ivory, or ebony were common. The figure of the “woman with a mandolin” even became a recurring motif in the iconography of the period, a sign that the instrument also belonged to a culture of refinement, salons, and intimate music-making. The mandolin’s solo repertoire began around 1700 with the first sonatas. The instrument then enjoyed a genuine golden age between 1750 and 1790, principally in Italy and France. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote Don Giovanni in 1787, he was drawing on a tradition that had already existed for nearly a century: that of the mandolin serenade in operas, cantatas, and oratorios. Mozart elevated the instrument to new heights. Domenico Scarlatti and George Frideric Handel also used it, followed somewhat later by Niccolò Paganini. Nearly one hundred mandolin concertos were composed, along with numerous works by composers both famous and obscure. I have personally researched old scores, sorted, edited, and brought back into circulation around ten interesting sonatas written for the mandolin. I edited Scarlatti’s six sonatas, as well as the twelve sonatas by Gabriele Leone, a major eighteenth-century mandolinist who truly brought the instrument’s technique to its peak. I am currently also working on editions of works by Antonio Vivaldi.

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