Ouvertures à la française: migrations musicales dans l'espace germanique, 1660–1730 Louis Delpech Turnhout: Brepols, 2020 pp. 349, ISBN 978 2 503 58858 2

Abstract

While a student at the School of St Michael’s in Lüneburg between 1700 and 1702, Johann Sebastian Bach had the opportunity to visit nearby Celle. There, as C. P. E. Bach and Agricola would later write, he could hear ‘a once-celebrated cappella financed by the Duke of Celle and composed primarily of Frenchmen, and thereby learn the French taste, which, at that time and in those regions, was something entirely new’ (256; my translations throughout). Louis Delpech has done the musicological community an enormous service in exploring the world of such musicians as those in the Celle cappella. He offers a view at once detailed and panoramic of the migration of French musicians to Germany (chapter 1), the courtly institutional structures in which they worked (chapter 2) and some of the practicalities of their lives (chapter 3). This panorama also encompasses the dissemination of French music as represented by printed editions, manuscript copies and other material sources (chapter 4), as well as shifts in the compositional and critical reception of the ‘French taste’ (chapter 5). Delpech thereby adds to recent scholarship on musical circulation and travelling musicians, offering a complement to research focused on the diaspora of Italian musicians in Germany. There were important differences to these modes of circulation, he emphasizes. Whereas Italian musicians in Germany were primarily highly specialized composers, singers or librettists, French ones were almost always polyvalent instrumentalists, especially string players and oboists (137). In his Introduction, Delpech situates his study within the field of cultural transfer. He does address such issues as what Kusser, Telemann, Bach and others learned from French musicians at Celle, Dresden, Osnabrück and Hanover (the Saxon and Lower Saxon courts that were most receptive to French musicians). However, he considers the traditional goods of trade in histories of influence (compositional styles and critical ideas) only in his fifth chapter – that is, after meticulous examination of the human and material side of musical migrations. More a ‘style of research’ than a well-articulated methodology, his ‘prosopographic approach’ consists in ‘elucidating the constants and the evolution of a social group from the angle of individual trajectories and specific biographies of its constituent members’ (10). This approach carries over from the biographical to the musical domain in its careful attention to the provenance and dissemination of musical sources as material objects. It allows for a more detailed portrait of musical practices in Germany than would consideration of musical works as abstract entities (192). In practice, this means that Delpech marshalls information culled from innumerable primary sources – personnel rosters, pay documents, receipts, inventories, court documents, baptism, marriage and death records, official correspondence, private letters, engraved editions, musical manuscripts, and private assemblages of music, to name but a few of the many types of sources surveyed – in order to reconstruct the movements of individual French musicians and individual musical