TWO MUSICAL LIBRARIES OF PARIS

Abstract

ALL the libraries of France contain music books-sacred or secular, in manuscript or in print-, but there does not yet exist a complete systematic inventory of them; however, the music of the provincial libraries and of some in Paris was included in the Catalogue des manuscrits des Bibliothdques de France. (In this catalogue is found the inventory of the libraries of Avignon and Carpentras, which are especially important; the latter contains an autograph manuscript of J. S. Bach.) Of the two great French musical collections-that of the Conservatoire National de Musique and that of the Opera (not to mention the Bibliothbque Nationale, which is notable on more than one count and which receives all the new publications)--, each in its specialty can be considered among the richest in existence. The origin of the first goes back to the period of the Revolution; that of the second, to the creation of the Op6ra itself under Louis XIV in 1669. These collections, which have grown considerably in the course of years, and especially in modern times, are at present undergoing a general cataloguing, for which research-workers have long clamored, and which every day reveals some unknown publication or rare manuscript. It is already possible to consider these two depositories as a whole; and we propose now to survey them rapidly and to say a few words about them. Let us begin by glancing briefly at their history, pausing at some musical autographs, of which the Conservatoire alone contains about 15,000. The Conservatoire has a double origin. First, it succeeded the iEcole de Musique, founded by Louis XVI in 1784; this served as an annex to the Menus plaisirs du Roi, the Paris warehouses of which were installed in the Faubourg Poissonnikre. The lcole was dissolved in 1793 by the Revolution, which, by the law of the 16th Thermidor, Year III (August 3, 1795), created at first an Institut National de Musique, later transformed into