Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-16T16:17:08.636Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘My father was a poor Parisian musician’: A Memoir (1756) concerning Rameau, Handel's Library and Sallé

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

The emergence in 1756 of the Journal encyclopédique, published in Liège (later in Bouillon), encouraged an international readership to view cultural developments across national boundaries. An anonymous review of Rameau's new version of Zoroastre was prefaced by ‘Mémoires d'un musicien’, whose author recalls significant events in his musical education and life history to date. These include extended travels to England and Italy. The narrator describes meeting Handel and also Marie Sallé in London, and details various contents of Handel's library supposedly seen and discussed on more than one visit, deduced as occurring late in 1746. These accounts are analysed and contextualized, and a report on archival searches for the author's identity provided, together with an English translation of the 1756 text.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

We wish to thank two colleagues who, in many particulars, gave extended help during the preparation of this article: Anthony Hicks (London) and Sarah McCleave (Queen's University, Belfast). In addition we thank those whose kind searches or other offices on our behalf produced useful information in many of the different areas investigated: Monique Abud (Paris); Hervé Audéon (Paris); Guy Biart (Namur); Cyprian Blamires (Oxford); Bruce Alan Brown (Southern California); Donald Burrows (Open University); Peter R. Campbell (Sussex); A. W. F. Charlton (London); James Clements (London); Manuel Couvreur (Brussels); Graham Dixon (London); Annick Fiaschi-Dubois (Montpellier); Elisabeth Garms-Cornides (Rome); David Garrioch (Monash University); Wendy Gibson (Reading); Hannah Godfrey-Mahapatra (New York); Eva Haas-Betzwieser (Berlin); Michel Henrion (Bouillon); Erik Kocevar (Dijon); Marco Marica (Rome); John McManners (Oxford); Sabine Mehlem (Berlin); Harvey Mitchell (Vancouver); Jean-Paul Montagnier (Nancy); Philip Robinson (Canterbury); the late John Rosselli; Graham Sadler (Hull); Jean Sgard (Grenoble); Peter Turner (Norwich); Jeroom Vercruysse (St Martens-Lennik); Jacques Wagner (Clermont-Ferrand); Louis de Weissenbruch (Brussels).Google Scholar

1 JE, 1756, iv/1 (15 May), 95. All English translations in this article are our own.Google Scholar

2 Cited by Julien Cain in the ‘Préface’ to the exhibition catalogue Musée Ducal: Le Journal encyclopédique et la Société Typographique: Exposition en hommage à Pierre Rousseau (Bouillon, 1955), 7.Google Scholar

3 These details from the Archives Weissenbruch are published in Raymond F. Birn, Pierre Rousseau and the ‘Philosophes’ of Bouillon, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 29 (Geneva, 1964), 38.Google Scholar

4 Jacques Wagner, ‘Rousseau, Pierre’, Dictionnaire des journalistes (1600–1789), ed. Jean Sgard, rev. edn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1999), ii, 879–82; Dictionnaire des journaux 1600–1789, ed. Sgard, 2 vols. (Paris and Oxford, 1991), ii, 670–3; Birn, Pierre Rousseau, 43.Google Scholar

5 Birn, Pierre Rousseau, 45. This was the case with certain other journals like the outlawed Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, founded in 1728, ‘each week read by hundreds of ardent members of the party’. Cyril B. O'Keefe, Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1762) (Geneva and Paris, 1974), 9. The JE had 1,200 subscribers in 1756 and this number continued to increase, throughout Europe. Wagner, ‘Rousseau’, 880.Google Scholar

6 Dictionnaire des journaux, ed. Sgard, ii, 672; Birn, Pierre Rousseau, 52. The title was Giornale enciclopedico di Liegi.Google Scholar

7 Jacques Wagner, ‘Lecture et société dans le Journal encyclopédique de Pierre Rousseau (1756-1785)’ (doctorat d'État, Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1987); idem, ‘Le rôle du Journal encyclopédique dans la diffusion de la culture’, Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 193 (Oxford, 1980), 1805–12.Google Scholar

8 Dante Lénardon, Index du Journal encyclopédique 1756–1793 (Geneva, 1976).Google Scholar

9 Wagner, ‘Lecture et société’, part I, chapter 2, section iii ('La bibliothèque des journalistes'), 260–1. Unfortunately no clues as to the identity of the author of the ‘Mémoires’ have been found in the autograph letters of Pierre Rousseau in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter F–Pn), MS fr. 22133 (correspondence with Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes) or in Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Nachlass Formey (correspondence with Jean Henri Samuel Formey, which effectively starts in 1758). Further Rousseau letters in Cracow (Sammlung Varnhagen von Hense, starting in 1757), Brussels, Liège and The Hague (details in Wagner, ‘Rousseau’, 881) might yield results.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., ‘Introduction’, 64. For Birn, Pierre Rousseau, 49, the year 1756 is described as one in which Rousseau and two or three helpers wrote and managed everything, but as we shall see shortly this view cannot easily be sustained. His earliest helpers were the abbé Prevôt de la Caussade, ‘a secularly inclined seminarist’; the abbé Claude Yvon, author of the article ‘Âme’ in Diderot's Encyclopédie; and one Desroches, probably the one who by 1761 was directeur général in the office of the journal Annonces et avis des Pays-Bas: see François Moureau, ‘Préface’, Répertoire des nouvelles à la main (Oxford, 1999), xxxvii.Google Scholar

11 Wagner, ‘Lecture et société’, ‘Introduction’, 41.Google Scholar

12 JE, 1756, v/3 (1 August), 99103.Google Scholar

13 JE, 1758, viii/1 (15 November), 139–40.Google Scholar

14 JE, 1756, iv/1 (15 May), 105.Google Scholar

15 We hope that readers without access to the original edition will be able to consult a copy of the complete reprint (Geneva, 1968).Google Scholar

16 These elements were cited by Jacques Wagner in his address to the session ‘Revues culturelles et critique littéraire au XVIIIe siècle, après 1750: Autour du Journal encyclopédique‘ during the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment, Dublin, July 1999.Google Scholar

17 Louis de Cahusac was the librettist, and ‘in the preface to the 1749 livret, he assured readers of the scholarship that had gone into writing it … The story also allowed Cahusac to design a plot of magnificent proportions.‘ Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, 1998), 112–13.Google Scholar

18 Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva, 1985). Pierre Rousseau's expressed view in a letter of 18 May 1758 was that ‘après la france, l'angleterre est le païs le plus fecond en bonnes choses’: Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Nachlass Formey, Kasten 34, Pierre Rousseau letters, f. 11. Rousseau subsequently contacted Matthieu Maty (1718-76) of London in the quest for contributions.Google Scholar

19 The Life Records of John Milton, ed. Joseph Milton French, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949–58), v, 124.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.; a partial list of known or supposed copies from his collection is on pp. 125–31.Google Scholar

21 Cash, Arthur H., Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London, 1986), 74–5.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 337. Cash's account of Sterne's use of sources (p. 76) is not without interest for musicologists.Google Scholar

23 Roberts, John H., ‘Why did Handel Borrow?‘, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, 1987), 8392 (p. 86). The most recent detailed research on the subject, by Richard G. King, is discussed below (see note 24).Google Scholar

24 King, Richard G., ‘New Light on Handel's Musical Library’, Musical Quarterly, 81 (1997), 109–38. For background information concerning Handel's archives of his own music, see Clausen, Hans Dieter, ‘The Hamburg Collection’, Handel Collections and their History, ed. Terence Best (Oxford, 1993), 10–28.Google Scholar

25 Neal Zaslaw, ‘Scylla et Glaucus: A Case Study’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 199–228 (p. 216).Google Scholar

26 Handel Sources: Materials for the Study of Handel's Borrowing, ed. John H. Roberts, 9 vols. (New York and London, 1986).Google Scholar

27 Ibid., vol. vi.Google Scholar

28 [William Coxe], Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel and John Christopher Smith (London, 1799), 6n.Google Scholar

29 Roberts, John H., ‘Handel's Opera Ghosts: Musical Relationships with Italian Settings of his London Libretti’, paper delivered at the Handel Institute, London, 20 November 1999.Google Scholar

30 King, ‘New Light’, 119–21. Also Victor Schoelcher, The Life of Handel (London, [c.1857]), 344–53.Google Scholar

31 King, ‘New Light’, 121, citing Friedrich Chrysander, ‘Victor Schoelcher: Eine Erinnerung’, Die Zukunft, 6 (20 January 1894), 117–23 (p. 119).Google Scholar

32 John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (new edn, 2 vols., London, 1875), ii, 650, 901 (book 14, chapter 136; book 20, chapter 195).Google Scholar

33 Marc Signorile, ‘Mondonville, Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn (London, 2001), xvi, 918–19 (p. 918).Google Scholar

34 King, ‘New Light’, 109; Jacob Simon, ‘Handel's Library: The Evidence of Book Subscription Lists’, Handel: A Celebration of his Life and Times 1685–1759, ed. Simon (London, 1985), 286–8.Google Scholar

35 ‘Sallé, Francis’ and ‘Sallé, Marie’, Philip H. Highfill, Jr, et al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, IL, 1973–93), xiii, 179–80, 181–4 (p. 180), give the place of burial as St Augustine's Church, Hackney; Stanley W. E. Vince, ‘Sallé in London’, Dance and Dancers, 13/v (May 1962), 30–2, gives St John's Church, Hackney.Google Scholar

36 Sarah McCleave, ‘Dancing at the English Opera: Marie Sallé's Letter to the Duchess of Richmond’, Dance Research, 17 (1999), 2246 (p. 31).Google Scholar

37 ‘Sallé … quitta Paris en 1741, pour passer en Angleterre.’ [Joseph de La Porte and Jean-Marie Clément], Anecdotes dramatiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1775), iii, 458 (repr. Geneva, 1971, 417); Émile Dacier, Une danseuse de l'Opéra sous Louis XV: Mlle Sallé (1707–1756) d'après des documents inédits (Paris, 1909), 253–64. Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, xiii, 183, simply claim that ‘Incensed, she left England at the end of the [1735] season and never returned.’Google Scholar

38 Lowell Lindgren, ‘Handel's London – Italian Musicians and Librettists’, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Donald Burrows (Cambridge, 1997), 7891 (p. 85).Google Scholar

39 The Fausans were the couple Antonio Rinaldi and his wife: Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, v, 188; xii, 385.Google Scholar

40 Judith Milhous, ‘Hasse's Comic Tunes: Some Dancers and Dance Music on the London Stage, 1740–59‘, Dance Research, 2 (1984), 4155.Google Scholar

41 Thomas Harris, London, to James Harris, Salisbury. Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill, Music and Theatre in Handel's World: The Family Papers of James Harris 1732–1780 (Oxford, 2002), 222.Google Scholar

42 Thomas Harris, London, to Elizabeth Harris, Salisbury. Ibid., 232.Google Scholar

43 ‘Garrick, Mrs David, Eva Maria, née Veigel, called “Violette”’, Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, vi, 104–12 (p. 105); Milhous, ‘Hasse's Comic Tunes’, 43.Google Scholar

44 Donald Burrows, Handel, The Master Musicians (Oxford, 1994), 294.Google Scholar

45 ‘Rich, John, called “Lun”‘, Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, xii, 337–53 (p. 350). His wealth allowed him to expend large sums on both equine and human company.Google Scholar

46 Anthony Hicks, ‘Handel and the Idea of an Oratorio’, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Burrows, 145–63 (p. 159). Although this account in no way suggests the following hypothesis, it relies on the evidence of Christopher Smith in 1743, who wondered ‘how the Quality will take it that He can compose for Himself and not for them’.Google Scholar

47 Händel-Handbuch, ed. Walter Eisen and Margret Eisen, iv: Dokumente zu Leben und Schaffen (Kassel, 1985), 386: Jennens to Holdsworth, 21 February 1745. Jennens's tone is partly explained by his disenchantment with precisely this turn of Handel's preferences.Google Scholar

48 Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959), 414, 429.Google Scholar

49 ‘Hercules’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (London, 1992), ii, 700–1.Google Scholar

50 Letter of 24 November 1744 from Thomas and George Harris, London, to James Harris, Salisbury. Burrows and Dunhill, Music and Theatre in Handel's World, 206.Google Scholar

51 McCleave, ‘Dancing at the English Opera’.Google Scholar

52 Burrows, Handel, 291.Google Scholar

53 Certain elements in the opera-loving classes continued to harbour bad feeling towards Handel, both for abandoning Italian opera himself and for acting with condescension towards Lord Middlesex's initiatives. Hicks, ‘Handel and the Idea of an Oratorio’, 159. These are vividly referred to in letters during 1744, for example that of 12 January from the Fourth Earl Shaftesbury, London, to James Harris, Salisbury: ‘The Opera people take incredible pains to hurt him [Handel].‘ Burrows and Dunhill, Music and Theatre in Handel's World, 183.Google Scholar

54 Milhous, ‘Hasse's Comic Tunes’, 44: they were Auretti, Aurettina, Debovè, Nardi, Alovar, Sodi and Valenti.Google Scholar

55 Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, Le pour et contre: Ouvrage périodique d'un goût nouveau, 20 vols. (Paris, 1733–40), iii (1734), 215 (also cited in Dacier, Une danseuse de l'Opéra, 151, but giving the incorrect vol. ‘ii’ as reference). The dating of the story is confirmed in Jean Sgard, Le ‘Pour et contre’ de Prévost: Introduction, tables et index (Paris, [1969]).Google Scholar

56 Castil-Blaze (François Henri Joseph Blaze), L'Académie Impériale de Musique de 1645 à 1855, 2 vols. (Paris, 1855), i, 135–6; Sarah Yuill McCleave, ‘Dance in Handel's Italian Operas: The Collaboration with Marie Sallé‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College, London, 1993), 24–5. Castil-Blaze's supposed sums were 3,000 guineas (offered by an entrepreneur) against 3,000 francs (offered by Handel), but the latter makes no sense, being equivalent to £125, and the former sum is hardly credible.Google Scholar

57 ‘When a choirboy's voice broke, the chapter saw to his future. There was a “trousseau” of clothing and a leaving payment, a basic sum with extras … At Notre-Dame of Paris and the great parish of Saint-Eustache and at Chartres, the total was regularly 300 livres or more.‘ John McManners, Church and State in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998), i, 453.Google Scholar

58 Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986); Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (2nd edn, Aberdeen, 1995).Google Scholar

59 Lenman, The Jacobite Risings, 254; see also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1996), 8591.Google Scholar

60 McLynn, Frank J., France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981).Google Scholar

61 Elizabeth Gibson, ‘Italian Opera in London, 1750–1775: Management and Finances’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 4759 (p. 52, note 5); Milhous, ‘Hasse's Comic Tunes‘, 43.Google Scholar

62 See above, note 43.Google Scholar

63 Gravelot (Hubert-François Bourguignon, 1699–1773) had worked as an illustrator, painter and engraver in England since 1733 and exerted a critical influence, but ‘after the Battle of Fontenoy [11 May 1745: a French victory over the allies] … returned to Paris. English feeling against the French was running high, and he is said to have been made uncomfortable by the accusations and suspicions of some of his adopted countrymen.’ Kimerly Rorschach, ‘Gravelot’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (London, 1996), xiii, 324–5. Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies, 172, claims that the painter Philip Mercier (1689 or 1691–1760) acted likewise, but The Dictionary of Art shows that he was of Huguenot descent, living in York at the time, and did not emigrate.Google Scholar

64 From Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces (2nd edn, London, 1775), i, 267–8, quoted in Patricia Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents (Oxford, 1995), 20.Google Scholar

65 The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 15 (1745; repr. London, 1998), 665 (Historical Chronicle, Thursday 5 December 1745).Google Scholar

66 Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières Grimoard de Pestels de Levis, comte de Caylus (1692–1765). For a recent assessment see Haskell, Francis, History and its Images (New York, 1993). One of Caylus's publications, Tableaux tirés de l'Iliade, de l'Odysée d'Homere et de L'Eneide de Virgile (Paris, 1757), specifically existed to reveal Homer and Virgil as sources for artists.Google Scholar

67 Guillaume Coustou père (1677–1746), creator of the important ‘Marly’ horses now to be found at the entrance of the Champs-Elysées; Guillaume Coustou fils (1716–77), a relatively minor sculptor.Google Scholar

68 See, for example, Samuel Rocheblave, Essai sur le comte de Caylus (Paris, 1889), and François Souchal, Les frères Coustou (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar

69 For example, a 1788 source tells the same story about Bouchardon but substitutes Caylus for Gros de Boze. Antoine Nicolas Dézallier d'Argenville, Vies des fameux sculpteurs, depuis la renaissance des arts (Paris, 1788), ii, 328.Google Scholar

70 He was a protégé of Caylus who, in his obituary address, mentioned Bouchardon's love of music and composition of musical works ‘dont la distribution et l'harmonie ont touché plusieurs grands compositeurs’. [Caylus], Vie d'Edme Bouchardon (Paris, 1762), 28; see also Alphonse Roserot, Edme Bouchardon (Paris, 1910). A modern appreciation is in Wend Graf Kalnein and Michael Levey, Art and Architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France (Harmondsworth, 1972).Google Scholar

71 Roserot, Edme Bouchardon, 145–6.Google Scholar

72 Mémoires inédits de Charles-Nicolas Cochin sur le Comte de Caylus, Bouchardon, les Slodtz, ed. Charles Henry Paris (Baur, 1880), 94–5.Google Scholar

73 The phrase used was ‘ouvriers renforcés’; ibid., 107.Google Scholar

74 Ibid., 95.Google Scholar

75 Hopkins, Donald R., Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago, 1983), 41.Google Scholar

77 See, for example, Wortley Montagu's Selected Letters, ed. Isobel Grundy (Harmondsworth, 1997), 158 and passim.Google Scholar

78 James Moore, The History of the Small Pox (London, 1815), 247.Google Scholar

79 The last 731 cases resulted in only seven deaths. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Mémoire sur l'inoculation de la petite vérole: Lu à l'assemblée publique de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, le mercredi 24 avril 1754 (Paris, 1754), 21. The fact that ‘innovation [in treatment] spread first in rural and small-town environments and bypassed large urban centres’ was due to smallpox being a childhood disease in the latter but remaining an epidemic in the former, attacking young adults and adolescents. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Harmondsworth, 1979), 230.Google Scholar

80 The surgeon was Tenon. Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), 212.Google Scholar

81 The duc d'Aumont and the prince de Lorraine both died of it. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 45–6.Google Scholar

82 Grieder, Anglomania in France 1740–1789, 10.Google Scholar

83 Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation, 217–20. The surgeon was Théodore Tronchin; Orléans's family was applauded publicly at the Opéra and the librettist Poinsinet published a poem dedicated to him.Google Scholar

84 Dacier, Une danseuse de l'Opéra, 253. Around this time the young Noverre records ‘je la vis souvent chez elle’. Jean Georges Noverre, Lettres sur les arts imitateurs en général et sur la danse en particulier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1807), ii, 103; cited in Dacier, Une danseuse de l'Opéra, 252.Google Scholar

85 London, Public Record Office, SP.36 vol. 64: series of 23 letters from Bryan Pybus to one Stone (the government official), each letter corresponding to one sailing, and listing both the embarking and disembarking names.Google Scholar

86 Constant Pierre, Histoire du Concert Spirituel 1725–1790, ed. Antoine Bloch-Michel (Paris, 1975), 269.Google Scholar

87 JE, 1756, iv/1 (15 May), 110. However, for certain purposes in France a ‘year’ was understood to commence after Easter, not on 1 January.Google Scholar

88 Scipione Maffei: Epistolario (1700–1755), ed. Celestino Garibotto, 2 vols. (Milan, 1955): letter 1291 (5 July 1752) refers to meeting ‘un Cavaliere di tanto merito, che fa onore alla sua patria, e all’ Italia tutta' (ii, 1352) but the place of the letter's composition is Verona, not Venice.Google Scholar

89 Scipione Maffei: Epistolario, ed. Garibotto, ii, 1355, letter 1295 (26 [October?] 1752).Google Scholar

90 Birn, Pierre Rousseau, 97.Google Scholar

91 We thank in particular Prof. Jeroom Vercruysse, Prof. Jean Sgard and M. Guy Biart in this connection. Prof. Sgard put forward the names Antoine de Léris (b.1723) and Pierre de Morand (b.1701) for consideration, but (unlike the narrator) neither came from Paris.Google Scholar

92 For example, the review of Jacques Lacombe's Le spectacle des beaux-arts in JE, iii/3 (1 May 1758), 83103, contains ‘Mémoire‘-like rebuttals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's views concerning the French language as a medium for music, together with support for certain Italianizing influences.Google Scholar

93 Jean Joseph Expilly, ‘Paris’, Dictionnaire géographique, historique et politique des Gaules et de la France, 6 vols. (Amsterdam and Paris, 1768), v, 399–577, esp. pp. 469–72. The relevant churches were Notre-Dame, St-Marcel, St-Honoré, Ste-Opportune, St-Étienne-des-Grés, St-Benoît, St-Merry, St-Sépulchre, the Sainte-Chapelle, St-Thomas-du-Louvre, St-Louis-du-Louvre, St-Jacques-del'Hôpital, St-Germain-l'Auxerrois, St-Jean-le-Rond, St-Denis-du-Pas, St-Aignan and St-Nicolas-du-Louvre.Google Scholar

94 For archival sources, see below. Secondary sources included James Anthony, French Baroque Music (rev. edn, London, 1978); François-Léon Chartier, L'ancien chapitre de Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1897); Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. Marcelle Benoit (n.p., 1992). For reasons explained below we could eliminate St-Honoré: see Kocevar, Erik, ‘Frédéric Hubert Paulin (1678–1761), maître de musique de Saint-Honoré à Paris’, Recherches sur la musique française classique, 29 (1996–8), 189–221. The generous help of Hervé Audéon, Jean Duron, Erik Kocevar, Jean-Paul Montagnier and Michael Müller is gratefully acknowledged.Google Scholar

95 McManners, Church and Society, esp. vol. i, chapter 14, ‘Canons and Chapters’; chapter 15, ‘The Great Chapters: Architecture and Music’ (the last a synoptic account surely unparalleled in English). On boy choristers see ibid., i, 451–5.Google Scholar

96 Bernier's successor, François de Lacroix (or Delacroix), was an abbé, but died too late, in 1759.Google Scholar

97 Paris, Archives Nationales (hereafter F–Pan), S.75. Unfortunately the Almanach royal (see note 102 below) does not list members of this church's chapter.Google Scholar

98 See Duron, Jean, ‘Pétouille’, Dictionnaire de la musique en France, ed. Benoit, 550–1.Google Scholar

99 F–Pan LL.420.Google Scholar

100 Chartier, L'ancien chapitre; Bernadette Lespinard, ‘Lalouette’, Dictionnaire de la musique en France, ed. Benoit, 380; and information kindly supplied by Jean Duron. Three publications of church music by Lalouette are listed in Catalogue de la musique imprimée avant 1800 conservée dans les bibliothèques publiques de Paris, ed. François Lesure (Paris, 1981).Google Scholar

101 McManners, Church and Society, i, 647, 655.Google Scholar

102 Almanach royal … exactement supputé sur le méridien de Paris [1700–92] (Paris, 1735). There are currently 118 names of canons in the database.Google Scholar

103 F–Pan LL.232/15 (1) [1731] to LL.232/16 (2) [1734]. Additional information on certain families was checked in François Alexandre Aubert de La Chenaye des Bois and Badier, Dictionnaire de la noblesse, 19 vols. (3rd edn, Paris, 1863–76).Google Scholar

104 Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, 1979); Steven Laurence Kaplan, ‘Note sur les commissaires de police de Paris au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 17 (1981), 669–86. However, not all scellés were fixed by the commissaires of the Châtelet; see Anne-Lise Rey-Courtel, Les Archives Nationales: État des inventaires (Paris, 1986), iv: Fonds divers, 25. Thanks are due to Wendy Gibson for clarifying the situation regarding women and their wills in early modern France; and to David Garrioch for explaining details of the labyrinthine legal system and for help on the registers of scellés. The index of scellés is based on Émile Campardon's original work in the nineteenth century.Google Scholar

105 Robert Marquant, Les Archives Nationales: État général des fonds, iv: Fonds divers (Paris, 1980), 1114; Monique Limon, Les notaires au Châtelet de Paris sous le règne de Louis XIV: Étude institutionelle et sociale (Toulouse, 1992).Google Scholar

106 Rey-Courtel, Les Archives Nationales: État des inventaires, iv, 22 and 98; Émile Campardon, ‘Table alphabétique des publications enregistrées au Châtelet de Paris, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’ (handwritten catalogue, 1886); Gabrielle Vilar-Berrogain, Guide des recherches dans les fonds d'enregistrement sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1958), 97–8.Google Scholar

107 Vilar-Berrogain, Guide, 80.Google Scholar

108 Now in the Archives de Paris, series D.C6; vols. 227–30 for the years concerned, alphabetical index at D.C6.380.Google Scholar

109 The nine names located through Archives de Paris series D.C6 are Marguerite Hesse, dit Lefevre, née Bernard, d.1741; Marie Anne Lefranc, née Boileau, d.1744; Marie Madeleine Monneu, née Chevalier, d.1739; Marie Marguerite Gallier, née Chevalier, d.1741; Marguerite Legast, née Dubois, d.1743; Marguerite Graffin, née Hubert, d.1741; Marie Madeleine de Chauvel de Lamartine, née Lucas de Saint-Marc, d.1743; Catherine Blampin, née Larcher or Le Treher, d.1741; and Anne Charpentier, née Pajot, d.1742.Google Scholar

110 Madeleine De Labos-Dupré, née Boileau, d.1744; Marie Madeleine Laus, née Brulard, d.1740; Henriette Daubourg de la Romenery, née Dufour, d.1740; Louise Humbert, née Lucas, d.1740; Marie Marguerite Dubant, née Picard, d.1738; Marie Françoise Rivière, née Quignon, d.1741; Madeleine Baron, née De la Croix, d.1740.Google Scholar

111 Publicationswere drawn up a maximum of ten months after decease. Henriette de Choiseul's document (Y54 f463) was drawn up on 9 July 1740.Google Scholar

112 Will located at Étude Le Verrier, no. CXVIII/397. This Henriette had grandchildren and was already ‘sick in body’, though ‘healthy of mind’.Google Scholar

113 Archives de Paris, D.C6 Vol. 221, f. 251v.Google Scholar

114 Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford, 1991), 55, note 123.Google Scholar

115 Ibid., 55; see also Bruce Alan Brown, ‘Durazzo, Giacomo’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn), vii, 746–8.Google Scholar

116 Anon., Sentiment d'un harmoniphile sur différens ouvrages de musique (Amsterdam and Paris, [1756]; repr. Geneva, 1972). This author's brief self-portrait is not that of a musician trained from youth (p. 3); he was in favour of having the Opéra mount Italianate comic works as afterpieces to tragédies lyriques (pp. 133–5). His analysis of Zoroastre is on pp. 144–60.Google Scholar

117 Cecil Hopkinson, ‘Handel and France: Editions Published There during his Lifetime’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 3/vi (sessions 1953–4 and 1954–5) (Edinburgh, 1957), 223–48. It may be noted here that the following does not include reports on Paris or France: Theophil Antonicek, Zur Pflege Händelscher Musik in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 250/i (Vienna, 1966), 3–60.Google Scholar

118 Plus two further publications, one of J. C. Schulze's music masquerading as Handel's, the other of Babell's arrangements of Handel arias: all are found in William Charles Smith, Handel: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Editions (2nd edn, London, 1970), 223–4, 237, 243, 246, 252–3, 276, 304–5, 329.Google Scholar

119 Corrected by reference to Pierre, Histoire du Concert Spirituel, 244, 249: an aria of Handel was heard on 8 December 1736 and a concerto on 9 December 1743.Google Scholar

120 Lowell Lindgren, ‘Parisian Patronage of Performers from the Royal Academy of Musick (1719–28)‘, Music and Letters, 58 (1977), 428 (p. 22).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

121 Such metaphors are also found in the war of words over things English: anglomanie was described not only as a ‘sickness’ but also as an ‘epidemic sickness’. Grieder, Anglomania, 10.Google Scholar

122 Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London, 1955).Google Scholar

123 F–Pn Vm6 33: copy manuscript paginated 1113.Google Scholar

124 Les ensorcelés, ou Jeannot et Jeannette, a parodie mêlée de vaudevilles et d'ariettes; see F–Pn ThB. 3039 (1758 edition), air noté 22. In the same key, A major, but with different words ('Le badinage') the same melody appeared in 1764 in Dubreuil's anthology Dictionnaire lyrique portatif, 2 vols. (Paris, 1764), i, 235. For another French source of this music see F–Pn D. 14501, a manuscript ‘Recueil d'airs italiens’ where it is not identified on the (incomplete) contents list, but occupies pp. 1114, transposed to G major.Google Scholar

125 Händel-Handbuch, ed. Eisen and Eisen, iv: Dokumente zu Leben und Schaffen.Google Scholar

126 [Jean Bernard Le Blanc], Lettres d'un François (The Hague, 1745), 7385: ‘Lettre à M. le Duc de '; trans. as Letters on the English and French Nations (Dublin, 1747), 109–13: ‘To the Duke of D’ (p. 113). An earlier translated edition was announced and excerpted in The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 16 (1746; repr. London, 1998) 626–9.Google Scholar

127 Grieder, Anglomania, 34–5, note 3, citing Mornet, ‘Les enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750-1780)‘, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 17 (July–September 1910), 449–96.Google Scholar

a JE: ‘toutes les Ecoles de l'Europe’: thus ‘style’ in the sense of ‘national styles’. We have modernized the paragraphing in the following translation and indicated the original pagination within square brackets.Google Scholar

b Perhaps Jean-Baptiste-François Lalouette (1651–1728). See Section V above for further details.Google Scholar

c Perhaps Notre-Dame, Paris; otherwise the Parisian church of St-Germain-l'Auxerrois.Google Scholar

d At Notre-Dame, either Dean de Gontaut (to 1732) or Dean Abraham Harcourt de Beuvron (from 1733); see above, Section V.Google Scholar

e Indeed, the ‘Principes de composition’ of Nicolas Bernier were never published, being handed down presumably in various manuscripts, of which only one survives, at F–Pn Rés Vmb. ms. 2. See Philip Nelson's translated edition: Nicolas Bernier (1665–1734): Principles of Composition (Principes de Composition) (Brooklyn, NY, 1964).Google Scholar

f Bernier was maître de musique at the Sainte-Chapelle from 1705 to 1726. His many pupils included, for example, Louis Homet (1691–1777), who joined Notre-Dame in 1734.Google Scholar

g As shown in Philip Nelson's translation of Bernier's ‘Principes de composition’, Bernier's method is to break down musical procedures into intervallic rules which are discussed, with numerous examples, one by one through a series of topics forming the whole, like chapters: composition in two parts; cadences; variation of the modes; false relations; embellished counterpoint in two parts; suspensions; composition in three parts; embellished counterpoint in three parts; composition in four and five parts. It is easy to imagine the exceeding difficulty of remembering and explaining the numerous individual cases; the surviving manuscript is 111 pages in length.Google Scholar

h Here the word used is ‘brochure’, but this term alternates in the following lines with ‘livre’. See below, note i.Google Scholar

i Jean-Philippe Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels ([Paris]: Ballard, 1722). Roughly quarto in dimensions, it is divided into four parts and contains 432 pages and a supplement of 17 pages. Its substantial proportions, as well as its intellectual content, thus explain the narrator's dilemma described in the following sentences.Google Scholar

j JE: ‘je mis mon livre dans mon sein’: he kept it close to his breast.Google Scholar

k Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières Grimoard de Pestels de Levis, comte de Caylus (1692–1765).Google Scholar

l See above, Section V, for commentary: the sculptor concerned was Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) rather than Guillaume Coustou père (1677–1746) or Guillaume Coustou fils (1716–77).Google Scholar

m Praxiteles, celebrated Athenian sculptor born c.390 BC.Google Scholar

n Père Pierre Brumoy (1688–1742), Le théâtre des Grecs, 3 vols. (Paris: Rollin père, 1730, and re-edited up to 1825; English trans. 1759).Google Scholar

o See above, Section V, Table 2(b): 1740 was a peak year for total numbers of dead recorded in Paris, followed by steadily declining recorded levels.Google Scholar

p Inoculating doctors were active in Sussex, Hampshire, Surrey and Dorset.Google Scholar

q Spelt Hendel throughout. Handel's last Italian opera, Deidamia, had been given in 1741. However, the oratorios continued to be given their premières at Covent Garden or the King's Theatre.Google Scholar

r ‘Mais choisie dans tous les genres’: perhaps the narrator refers not just to music but also to books of various types, such as we know Handel possessed (see above).Google Scholar

s Marie Sallé (1706–56).Google Scholar

t Scipione Maffei (1675–1755).Google Scholar

u In Rome, the narrator could have heard the following of Jommelli: Artaserse (1749), Ifigenia in Aulide (1751), Talestri (1751), Attilio Regolo (1753) and a couple of intermezzi. Roman operas by Galuppi included Evergete (1747), Vologeso (1748), Antigone (1751) and Sofonisba (1753). Both composers produced one or two opere serie at the same period in Venice. Goldoni's and Galuppi's drammi giocosi were given every year in Venice from 1749 through to 1755.Google Scholar

v The form ‘Pomelli’ for Niccolò Jommelli (1714–74) appears also later in the Zoroastre review.Google Scholar