Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont by Don Fader

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont by Don Fader Michael Vincent Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont. By Don Fader. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2021. [xvii, 343 p. ISBN 9781783276288 (hard-cover), $115; ISBN 9781800102798 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, appendixes, index. Music in the eighteenth century is known for its international contexts. From Joseph Haydn’s proclamation that his language is understood all over the world to the ubiquity of Italian opera in capital cities, the pan-European culture called “cosmopolitanism” helped music flourish across national boundaries (p. 1). Don Fader explores an early case of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism in Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700. The book focuses on musical activities in the orbit of Charles-Henri de Lorraine, Prince de Vaudémont (1649–1723). The Lorrainese prince was culturally French but politically independent. He served as the governor of Milan from 1698 to 1706. Vaudémont was known for his military prowess and dancing skills. He impressed Louis XIV, who favored him personally even when they were at odds politically. The bulk of the book focuses on the cultural exchange that happened during Vaudémont’s Milanese period, when his court exchanged music and musicians between Paris, Germany, and other Italian courts. Much of the music examined comes from opera, but other genres considered include instrumental dance music, cantatas, and pedagogical treatises. Aligning with the book’s thesis that Vaudémont’s patronage resulted in a hybridization of French and Italian styles, the music that Fader examines demonstrates this cosmopolitan paradigm. The primary musical figure in the book is Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, who served as Vaudémont’s composer-in-residence and whom the prince sought out because of his cosmopolitan style and influence as a musician and publisher in France. This book is the first major published study on Montéclair, who composed instrumental and vocal music, wrote a violin method and other tutors, and was well known as a pedagogue. Along with Marc-Antoine Charpentier and André Campra, he was one of the first French composers to write an Italian aria. His early compositions appeared in well-known publications, which Fader analyzes and contextualizes. His music showed him as a composer at home in both French and Italian styles, which was ideal for Vaudémont’s taste and led to his employment with the prince. At its heart, the book is a documentary study of the musical activities that arose from Vaudémont’s patronage. Fader’s is the first major study of these documents, which include financial [End Page 61] records, correspondence, and other papers related to the prince’s holdings. Fader had his work cut out for him. Previously, there had been no major modern biography of the prince, perhaps owing to the difficulty of tracing scattered sources from an itinerant life. Furthermore, the Vaudémont papers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France consist of over one thousand sets of documents and have been combined with unrelated holdings from the nineteenth century. The book is therefore a major contribution to understanding the lives of two major historical figures, Vaudémont and Montéclair. Fader analyzes the vast collection of documents and insightfully reconstructs musical activ ities related to Vaudémont’s patronage. To cite one of many examples, he tracks the payment records of a Milanese violin band over the years 1698–1706 as they played for a number of occasions, including balls, royal birthdays, and other celebrations. The number of players varied as time went on, but Fader suggests that the frequent occurrences of twelve and twenty-four players meant that they modeled themselves on the French royal twenty-four violins. The first record of payment shows the band being paid “for the operas,” suggesting that the musicians were from the orchestra of the first major opera staged under Vaudémont’s patronage, La pros-perità di Elio Seiano, which ran from December 1698 to January 1699 (p. 65). Fader connects the band’s...