MUSICAL PATRONAGE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPAIN: THE MUSIC LIBRARY AND MUSIC INSTRUMENT COLLECTION OF THE XII DUKE OF ALBA (d. 1776)

Abstract

When Spanish musicologist Jos? Subir? was entrusted with ?revising? the music library of the Dukes of Alba in the Palacio de Liria in Madrid in 1924, he expected to find ?a vast literature of genuinely Spanish chamber music from the middle of the eighteenth Century.? His disappointment was thinly disguised in his foreword to the resulting study published three years later as La m?sica en la Casa de Alba (Madrid, 1927). Subir? attributed the small number and incompleteness of the musical works and documents in the Palacio de Liria, in part, to the effects of ?the fire that in 1795 consumed the libraries of the Houses of Villafranca and Alba, as well as a great number of bound documents of the Count-Duke of Olivares, housed in the Palacio de Buenavista.? (The Palacio de Buenavista is located diagonally across from the Plaza de Cibeles in the center of Madrid. It now houses the Ministry of Defense, the Spanish Army headquarters. The Duke of Alba acquired the property and the old palace in 1769 from the crown for 1,250,000 reales. He lived there for the last seven years of his life. His heir and grand-daughter, Cayetana de Silva, razed the old palace in 1777 and constructed the present Palacio de Buenavista. The Palacio de Liria was built in 1770 by the Dukes of Berwick y Liria, inheritors of the Alba title in 1802.) A recently discovered inventory and appraisal of the music and musical instruments belonging to Don Fernando de Silva y Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, who died in the Palacio de Buenavista on 15 November 1776 at the age of sixty-two, shows the Duke to have been a great collector and patron of chamber music by Spanish composers and