Napoléon Coste was born in France in 1806 and was taught the guitar by his mother. As a teenager he became a teacher of the instrument, and appeared in many concerts in the region. At the age of 24 he moved to Paris where he quickly established himself as the leading French virtuoso guitarist. However, by the time he arrived there, the demand for guitarists was in decline, and though his brilliance provided financial stability, he failed to find a publisher for his music which he had to fund himself. He was involved in an accident in 1863, resulting in a broken arm that brought his career to a premature end. He left a significant catalogue of music for the guitar, but much of it quickly fell from the repertoire.
Coste's Twenty-Five Etudes, Op. 38, have never been out of print since they first appeared in around 1873. As much exercises in composition as they are technical studies, these pieces feature a harmonic sophistication unprecedented in guitar music except perhaps in the works of Sor; several of them are uncompromisingly polyphonic, sustaining three and even four moving voices. Nevertheless, Coste disguised his didactic intents with plenty of attractive melodies, sparkling scale passages, and several brilliant cadenzas, creating one of the guitar repertory's finest sets of concert etudes. Most were dedicated to a friend or pupil; No. 9, for example, was dedicated to Soffren Degen, the Dane whose collection of Coste manuscripts has become an invaluable resource to modern scholars studying this composer's music Étude No. 25 was dedicated to Nikolai Makarov, the wealthy Russian nobleman and guitar aficionado who sponsored the Brussels Concours of 1856, a competition to which thirty-one guitar composers submitted sixty-four compositions. (Coste won second prize; the first prize was awarded to Mertz). Étude No. 14 was an Andante extracted from an unpublished Fantaisie symphonique, and dedicated by the composer to his wife.
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