Alphonse d'Eve

Alphonse d'Eve was born in Brussels in 1666 and died in Antwerp in 1727. Since Belgium as such didn't exist until it was created by the Treaty of London in 1832, we must call him a Flemish composer of the Baroque period, though New Groves declares him somewhat perversely a 'South Netherlands' composer (not a geographic term I've heard a lot, to be honest)! I'm afraid that I have not found any reliable portraits of him: he gets one of this site's 'anonymous' composer images as a result.

From the cataloguing/tagging point-of-view, it must be emphasised that the correct spelling is to use a lower-case ‘d’, followed by upper-case ‘E’, without an accent: this is as per New Grove. Some sites (mentioning no names, but Wikipedia comes to mind) will mention D'Eve or d'Ève, but those are not correct, per New Groves -though Groves does offer the bracketed variant 'Heve', which no-one ever uses!

He lived a life of pretty much total obscurity: he's not listed in any official documents until, aged 52, he was appointed master of singing at Antwerp Cathedral for a six-month period. He was made to resign the post on account of his age, which seems a bit harsh! His music is written in a distinctly Italian galant manner: musical ideas are dissolved in melodic formulae, sequential figuration, lively rhythmic patterns, with lots of ornamentation and trills. His is not the monumental music common at the time in that location. Unfortunately, most of his works have been lost (including a comic opera on the theme of Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha) and his surviving output is thus quite small: just a handful of masses and a dozen or so motets.