After Montéclair’s return to Paris in early 1701, he maintained connections with Milan: he collaborated on Pollarolo’s Ascanio in 1701–02 by writing the dance music and he certainly had renewed contact with his old colleagues – Philbois and L’Evêque – who visited Paris in the latter half of 1701 and 1702–03, respectively. Although this period of Montéclair’s life is otherwise largely a blank page, collaboration with Italians must have had a profound effect on such a highly talented French musician who was still in his 30s. How could this experience not have left its mark on him? Until recently, however, there was little indication that Montéclair was the source of a dramatic musical paradigm shift or that he developed some sort of brilliant new synthesis. Posterity did not treat him kindly: until the 1980s, when his music – and especially his cantates – began to be performed regularly, he was known largely as a “preramiste” Kleinmeister critic of Rameau. Unlike Rameau, whose prestige as a composer rested on his operas, Montéclair wrote only two works for the Académie royale de musique: the ballet Les Fêtes de l’été (1716) and his sacred tragedy, Jephté (1732), which achieved substantial success only to be eclipsed by Rameau’s premiere opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). This reception has hindered an appreciation of Montéclair’s importance and he has never been the subject of a major published study. Although this chapter is by no means a complete investigation of Montéclair’s life and music, it traces the contributions of his Italian experience to his career, to the broader French musical culture of the time and to an understanding of early eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism.

One reason Montéclair’s trip to Italy seems not to have left a clear trace on Parisian musical culture was a hiatus in his publishing of compositions: despite having actively published before his departure, he issued no more works after his return until around 1714, a fourteen-year gap. This period was one in which the new language of the goûts-réunis in vocal music was developed. Not only had Italian arias based on the new style of Scarlatti, Bononcini and others, appeared frequently in domestic spaces and even on the operatic stage, they served a radical leap: the development a new genre, the cantate, that employed the Italian style to set French texts.

The Contents of F-Pc D 11588

Although this exchange between the cosmopolitan Mozart and the internationally inexperienced Haydn is quite possibly the invention of Haydn’s early biographer, it says a great deal about changing attitudes toward music in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries when it was written. It reflects both an ideal – that music represented expression beyond language – as well as a reality: the international renown won by what has become known as “the Viennese classical style,” the musical language Haydn spoke. The ideal and the reality both represent culminating developments in a century that began with many different musical capitals speaking different musical languages and saw various réunions of national styles. These were very often the result of sometimes difficult German, Austrian and Italian interactions with French music, literature and culture: among them Johann Joachim Quantz’s vermischter Geschmack (mixed taste), the style galant and Italian opera “reform” based on French dramatic principles.

The question of how these changes in cultural orientation came about is a complex one, and its study has developed considerably over the years. Traditionally, scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and the arts in the West focused on repertoire of a particular place, context, or artist, but there has been a gradual realization that these approaches tend to overlook contributions made via travel and collaboration. This problem has been front and center in the historical disciplines for some time, coming to prominence in the 1980s and 90s with the concept of “cultural transfer” (transfert culturel) between one nation and another, and more recently via the notion of the histoire croisée, which recognizes more complex mutual and ongoing processes of international influence. Unlike “cultural transfer,” which implies flow from one place to another, the manyfold processes traced in an histoire croisée have no fixed nomenclature; I will refer to them as “cultural exchange.”

These two famous aphorisms from major players in réunions of national styles clearly affirm the centrality of cosmopolitanism in musical developments of the first half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, neither of these musicians, nor their French and Italian compatriots, wrote at great length about what they meant by “appropriate judgement” and “esteem” in music, that is, about the principles by which various style characteristics were valued and selected. Likewise, the grand aesthetic debates over French and Italian opera largely did not involve musicians, nor did they necessarily reflect the understanding of the composers and others in contexts involved in creating a réunion des goûts. Thanks to a particularly detailed network of documents, it is possible to gain a clearer understanding not only of these views but also their historical and cultural roots. The travels of the prince de Vaudémont, Montéclair and their compatriots in Milan, Paris and elsewhere, present an unusually vibrant – if complex – histoire croisée of early eighteenth-century Franco-Italian exchanges. Travel by musicians and dancers exposed them to a reality of practice that went beyond notated music and choreographies, or written descriptions. In the case of d’Averara, Montéclair, Philbois and Des Noyers, it involved them directly in collaborations with others trained in foreign idioms in a way that required negotiation and mutual understanding. Although no records of these negotiations survive, their products clearly reflect at least some of the problems these figures encountered and the solutions they deployed.

This histoire croisée reinforces the realization that the influence of travel did not flow in only one direction but affected both travelers and those whom they encountered on their travels. At the same time, these encounters reveal that the influence of travel depended on the prior experience of one another’s cultures: pre-existing connections and commonalities often shaped cultural interactions in fundamental ways. This is particularly evident in the Italian adoption of particular French genres used to accompany social dancing that employed musical elements familiar to Italians, for example, regular phrasing.

The previous chapters demonstrated the lengths to which Vaudémont and his assistants went to assemble a cosmopolitan corps of librettists, composers, dancers and musicians for opera productions. This mixed company made Milan the center of multiple exchanges with Paris, Hanover, Turin, Venice and various Lombardic states. The international connections of those who worked at the Milan opera and who had been trained in French style or performed extensively with French-trained musicians and dancers can be summarized thus:

This chapter focuses on the problems that needed to be resolved in – and the artistic fruits of – collaborations between musicians and dancers whose training and experience were varied and whose audience was a diverse Italian, French and Spanish mix. The study of these collaborations not only provides a window on the creative efforts at incorporating French elements into Italian operas of the period, but also represents the beginning of a more complete picture of the spread of French choreographic and musical techniques in northern Italy via the various connections maintained by Vaudémont’s company.

The testimonies of Nolhac and Westerloo make it clear that the Milanese operatic repertoire under Vaudémont was impressive for its unusual degree of spectacle, especially “choruses and good dancers from Paris” combined “with the excellence of Italian music,” as Westerloo put it. There is no question that Milanese operas staged under Vaudémont were relatively lavish by Italian standards, something noted not only by foreigners but also by the Gazzetta di Milano which reported on 31 December 1698 that the first opera under the new governor “would be performed by the most celebrated virtuosi and made more sumptuous by the diversity of the scenes and costumes.” Angelica nel Catai, seen by Westerloo and performed for the visit of Philip V, had a particularly large cast. The libretto presents a long list of characters (Figure 3.1) drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso divided between the courts of Angelica and her lover, Osmiro. It included the principal characters and their courts (including two comic servants), a total of eleven singers, plus extras (comparse): nobles, pages, slaves and soldiers. This did not include the dancers who performed balli as “Sailors and fisherwomen,” “horticulturalists and gardeners” and “heroes and heroines,” nor the five deities who sang in the prologue and the dancers who represented “the idea of immortality and the caprices of fortune.”

Until recently, studies of music in Milan typically presented the period of Spanish rule as one of economic decline in which there was little interest in secular music. Most writers credit the Viennese influence under the Emperor for the rise of Milanese music in the eighteenth century, which saw a flourishing – particularly in the quality of the orchestral playing – under Sammartini, and the city drew such major composers as Gluck, Johann Christian Bach and Mozart. Milan has likewise typically been viewed as a peripheral location for opera that relied largely on libretti and scores written in the major centers of Rome, Venice and Naples. More recent studies, however, have begun to revise this view. Roberta Carpani has identified the importance of operas written by Carlo Maria Maggi in the 1660s and 70s, performed first privately at the theater on the Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore under Vitaliano Borromeo and then at the ducal theater in Milan. The work of Davide Daolmi on the early part of the century, and that of Carlo Lanfossi on the extant full scores of seventeenth-century Milanese operas, have drawn attention to a virtually unknown history and repertory. Nevertheless, major developments under Vaudémont, which paved the way for musical life under the new Austrian rule, have largely gone unnoticed: not only his importation of musicians and dancers, the commissioning of a series of new operas and the introduction of new musical elements (detailed in Chapter 3), but also the reconstruction of the opera theater in 1699, the “Regio, Ducal Nuovo Teatro” as it is referred to by the libretti to La prosperità di Elio Seiano and Ariovisto .Because this theatre only existed for nine years – it burned to the ground in 1708 and was replaced by a major new theatre in 1717 – its role has largely been overlooked. Similarly, although the presence of such important figures as Montéclair, Des Noyers and Philbois – who brought with them novel foreign styles and techniques – must have played an influential role in Milanese artistic life, there has until now been little evidence of it.

Vaudemont’s papers also contain records and correspondance from two other periods in which the prince recruited musicians in Paris, in 1713–14 and 1722 (see Table E.1). A fragmentary account records payments to several musicians including Des Noyers, whom Vaudemont temporarily rehired because he was paid on 2 December 1713 and 14 February 1714. This same account lists three other musicians: “Mlle Coulery,” “Sr. Lefebvre,” and “Sr. Bouley.” Vaudemont employed the latter two long enough to require entries in household pay records, which note that they were hired in Paris at the “pay of a valet de chambre” (one louis d’or per month), and they returned with the prince to Commercy. The same records also indicate that Vaudemont recruited two sisters called “Gentille” to sing in his musique, who were paid only once, in 1714.

These hires coincide with Vaudemont’s visit to Paris and with his association with the singer and composer Jean-Baptiste Dutartre (d. 1749), whose Divertissement pour la paix was performed for the prince on 25 February 1714 according to the title page of the print. The dedication of the volume indicates that the prince gave his “approbation” to the music, and that Dutartre composed it “for [him] alone.” Nevertheless it was performed at the Academie royale de musique in Paris on 15 May 1715 according to a later edition of the work. Two further editions dating from the middle of the century evidence the lasting popularity of Dutartre’s Divertissement.

This work celebrates the Peace of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of Spanish Succession, a development that Vaudemont – having lost his post in Milan when the French lost Italy – would certainly have celebrated. The work consists of a short prelude in French overture style, an accompanied recitative (“Accablez sous un poids d’une guerre effroyable”), a da capo air (“Que les plaisirs et les fetes, les ris, les jeux, les concerts”) and an air in musette style (“Charmans hautbois, tendres musettes”).

Musical Sources for Milanese Operas Performed under Vaudémont

No well-known European musician in the nineteenth century retained such an extensive network of female contacts who challenged traditional feminine roles as Franz Liszt. Indeed, I would argue that it was precisely such women who inspired Franz Liszt, who attracted him and entered into a reciprocal process of intellectual, artistic, companionable or erotic approximation with him. Such women had either already independently broken the traditional barriers of class and gender roles – as, for example, the writers Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859) and George Sand (1804–76) – or were encouraged through their encounter with Liszt to critical self-development, as, for example, the salonnière and later writer Marie d’Agoult (1805–76).2 The women mentioned belong to the context of European salon culture,3 which had started to revive with the movement of bourgeois artists away from the courts.

One of the most controversial and multifaceted aspects of Liszt’s life and career concerns his involvement with religion and the Catholic Church. The young Liszt maintained a distinctively secular profile as a flamboyant piano virtuoso of Mephistophelean powers and a restless Don Juan, replete with all the indulgences afforded a musical icon of his time. In his forties and fifties, however, his close relationship with the Catholic Church intensified; after a residency in the Vatican, he received minor orders and subsequently was known as Abbé Liszt. Audiences and critics remained suspicious: How sincere could his attitude toward religion be when he had led such a flamboyant and unconventional life? During his ‘years of pilgrimage’ he retained a long and public relationship with Marie d’Agoult, a woman he never married; he had had three illegitimate children; and after their breakup, he met and carried on an equally public relationship with Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. The fact that he decided to become an Abbé only after the thwarted nuptials to Sayn-Wittgenstein in Rome, continues to fuel mistrust of his motives.

In early December 1823, the twelve-year-old Franz Liszt concluded his first European concert tour. Following the young pianist’s initial accomplishments in Vienna, under the guidance of Czerny and Salieri, Liszt’s father set his sights on Paris as the next stage in his son’s artistic development. The city’s liberal social identity offered opportunities that Adam could scarcely ignore, and their tour was an attempt to position Liszt as the second coming of the young Mozart. Departing from Vienna on 20 September 1823, with performances in Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart and Straßburg en route, the Liszt family finally reached the French capital on 11 December.

Marking all the European cities that Liszt visited as a pianist or conductor would also draw a map of the offices of his music publishers. Such interconnection between concert life and music publishing is not unique to his career at all, as these two institutions of the urban music scene remained interdependent ever since their rise in the eighteenth century and during their golden era in the nineteenth century. However, the way that Liszt was able to grab and maintain the interest of so many bigger or smaller hubs of the music scene and music publishing through his own effort for decades is unique. The incredible intensity of his performing career has always been a popular topic. Much less attention has been given to the fact that he had over 120 publishing partners over his career, which is more than any of his contemporaries’ connections. And this remarkably high number was not an accident; Liszt achieved it through his versatile professional skills and exceptional flexibility. Publishers had to show similar virtues mutatis mutandis in order to establish long-term partnerships with composers and for their own profitability. Liszt met about 50 per cent of his publishers in Paris, and later during his travels and tours in the 1830s and 1840s. After his virtuoso career ended in 1847 and he settled in Weimar, foreign publishers lost some of their interest in him, while that of German publishers was maintained until his death; in fact, it became even stronger. Over his six-decade-long career, his compositions were published by at least forty-five German, twenty-four French, fifteen British, eleven Austrian, eight Italian and eight Russia-based publishers, as well as a few Hungarian, Czech, Swiss and Dutch publishers.

Liszt possessed, in addition to his fame and longevity, a singular attraction for artists. Especially in his youth, his Byronic good looks, characterised by an ivory profile, was such that his face was ‘one of the “looks” of the nineteenth century’.1 Much of this imagery can be placed within a very well-researched and documented biography to which the visual can constantly be referred. Nonetheless, the complexity and diversity of this vast array of representations is greater than one might at first expect as resulting simply from its scale. Richard Leppert aptly described this diversity when he observed that:

The nineteenth century saw revolutions not just within discrete artistic disciplines, but also among them. Salon culture and increasing cosmopolitanism brought together writers, painters, sculptors and composers, sparking both competition and collaboration. In his espousal of a Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork) ethos in his music dramas, Richard Wagner was the most vocal proponent of the inseparability of the arts, though in his case this meant serving simultaneously as composer, librettist and director. Later in the century, the Vienna Secession movement offered a more synergistic approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk concept, most notably in their exhibition hall of 1898. Designed by architect Joseph Maria Olbrich with sculptures by Koloman Moser, the Secession Building in Vienna is perhaps most famous for Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, an allegorical depiction of the Ninth Symphony that is the earliest significant painting inspired by a piece of music.