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Description
Description:
Drouet, like Paganini, wrote variations on God Save the King, which he performed to great acclaim in London on June 24 1829. At the same concert Mendelssohn, with whom Drouet had travelled to England, conducted the first English performance of his Midsummer Night's Dream. The occasion gave Drouet ample opportunity to show off his sensational double staccato. Some twenty years later Briccialdi, 'exceedingly popular in London' (Rockstro), wrote his own set of variations on the English national anthem. Both works, exercises de style in the virtuoso flute literature, must have presented the same challenge to flautists as Paganini's did to violinists.
