Calling on the Composer

by Julie Anne Sadie

Overview

Across Europe, more than three hundred houses and museums commemorate the composers who lived and worked in them. In Calling on the Composer, two distinguished musicologists guide the musically curious traveler or reader to these sites and provide essential information on their content and significance.

Whether lakeside hut or moated castle, clock tower or cave, village school or fine town house, the physical context for musical genius and the artefacts of day-to-day existence have a powerful impact on how we perceive the figure behind the music we know and love. Julie and Stanley Sadie have journeyed to thirty-one countries to compile this unique travel companion and reference source. They offer practical information for the visitor, seasoned insights, and lively commentary. Richly illustrated and supported by thorough maps, the entries on individual composers trace their steps through the practicalities of life and reveal to us the context of creativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300183948
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

Read an Excerpt

CALLING ON THE COMPOSER

A GUIDE TO EUROPEAN COMPOSER HOUSES AND MUSEUMS

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By Julie Anne Sadie Stanley Sadie

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Julie Anne Sadie and Stanley Sadie
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18394-8

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Chapter One

HERITAGE AND THE COMPOSER MUSEUM

Cultural memory and custodianship

The cultural memory of a literate and sophisticated society is bound to be determined by what has survived and has in some way been recorded for future generations. In the arts, the earliest collectors were the wealthy and the literate; accordingly, more often than not, we have inherited the objects – or such of them as have survived – that princes and bishops valued and wanted around them. In Europe, their castles and their cathedrals dominate our oldest architecture; and the art and imagery, the literature and the record-keeping, the music and music-making that best served their ends still colour our collective cultural identity.

The early history of music is largely informed by what those two groups chose to safeguard for themselves and for future generations. Because of the particular nature of music and the social and professional position of musicians, up to early modern times, only a small proportion of what was produced has survived, much of it anonymously. Not until the 18th century do we have relatively complete artistic legacies of individual composers, some of the material printed but much of it in manuscript. The earliest printed music dates from the end of the 15th century, but even as late as the 18th a great deal of music, especially when written for the church or the theatre, existed only in manuscript. Little is known of the daily lives and circumstances of early musicians except insofar as it pertained to the life of a church or a court; archival documents provide only the barest details.

Not until the late 18th century did heirs and admirers begin to preserve the personal possessions of composers, or other objects associated with them. Some such collections have been passed down to the present day. They include the musical sources themselves, the manuscripts and printed editions; the means, which is to say the musical instruments and other tools of their trade; and affirmation of their musical activities, for example in reminiscences, diaries, correspondence, reports and reviews as well as various forms of iconography and, from the 20th century, recordings. In the 19th century came a more acute awareness of and interest in the personalities and lives of great composers. Succeeding generations collected and preserved not only what was of direct musical import but also quite mundane objects, such as furniture, collections of books, clothes and other personal artefacts. This curiosity, even reverence, about the way of life of great creative artists led inevitably to an interest in the actual buildings in which they lived. The acquisition of such buildings offered an opportunity to experiment with re-creating the composer's world, using such artefacts as might have survived, but in any case using the hallowed space they inhabited. This increasing enthusiasm for the past, and in the doings of great men, was not of course exclusive to the world of music: the Shakespeare birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon was acquired for a museum in 1847, and the Goethe birthplace museum in Frankfurt am Main was opened in 1859. The first composer museum opened in 1880. Today, the number and variety of surviving collections and sites within Europe associated with specific composers are likely to astonish even the best-informed music lover.

Nature, conflict and commerce – the ravages of the elements, war and property development – have not always served these sites benevolently. Many have simply not survived (as we shall see in Chapter III). And often some, especially those from remoter times, are lost to us: we have no idea where Monteverdi or Purcell, for example, actually lived. A number of greatly loved composers have yet to be commemorated by a museum or significant memorial. Sometimes that is because there is no specific site that invites it (or, as with Delius, the obvious site is in a country foreign to the composer) but also because of the effort and energy and finance needed for the establishment of any kind of museum. The list of such composers is formidable – to name a few of them, active since 1600: Monteverdi, Sweelinck, Lully, Corelli, Purcell, the Scarlattis father and son, Vivaldi, Rameau, Telemann, Gluck, C.P.E. and J.C. Bach, Boccherini, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Offenbach, Franck, Borodin, Balakirev, Bizet, Sullivan, Fauré, Hindemith, Poulenc, Webern.... Some of these made their careers in countries other than those of their birth, which creates a special difficulty: no-one is particularly eager to commemorate either a foreigner or a fellow countryman who settled abroad. But one might reasonably have expected Mantua or Venice to celebrate Monteverdi, Paris Lully, Venice Vivaldi, Dijon Rameau, Lisbon Domenico Scarlatti, Berlin or Hamburg C.P.E. Bach, Madrid Boccherini, perhaps London Sullivan (Gilbert is remembered at the Grim's Dyke Hotel, formerly his villa, at Stanmore, north-west of London).

Those sites we do have vary enormously in scale and scope, from the professionally managed and fully staffed institution to a room or two within a house still occupied by members of the composer's family. Among the former, prime examples include the Händel-Haus in Halle, the Mozart Geburtshaus in Salzburg, the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, the Grieg house at Troldhaugen near Bergen and the Tchaikovsky house at Klin. Several others are family homes, among them the Verdi villa at Sant'Agata and the d'Indy country house at Boffres; these, like the Puccini villa at Torre del Lago Puccini, which is still in the ownership of the family but not lived in by them, were built under the direction of the composers themselves. A few composers have actually lived in their own museums: in Moscow, Aleksandr Goldenweiser willed his entire estate to the State in 1955 and opened his flat to the public while continuing to live in it until his death six years later; and his widow remained there for many years. There are other examples: we were shown Rimsky-Korsakov's dachas by his granddaughter, Revuts'ky's flat in Kiev by his son, Lyudkevych's study in L'viv and Walton's island paradise in Ischia by their respective widows, Wildgans's house outside Vienna by his sister-in-law, Saar's cottage deep in the Estonian countryside by his niece, Parry's refuge in the Sussex downs by his great-granddaughters.

Composers may often have been able to choose where they lived, and though some preferred isolation most, perforce, lived in urban centres near their places of work. But they could not choose where they were born. Many memorial houses, by virtue of being birthplaces, are in isolated positions, difficult of access, far from the centres of tourism and without the benefit of promotional resources. Numerous 18th- and 19th-century composers of central Europe were the sons of village schoolmasters, born in a cottage or the school itself next to a church. Some, especially in the former Russian Empire, were born in very humble village houses, although others – for example Glinka and Musorgsky – came from the opposite end of the social scale and spent their early years on large estates (Rakhmaninov was not born into an estate, but married into one and spent some of his middle years there).

Musical heritage

It may be appropriate at this point to consider, in broader terms, just what the term 'musical heritage' may be said to constitute, as far as museums and memorials are concerned, and to itemize its categories. Clearly, primacy among them belongs to actual musical works, that is, the musical sources: autograph manuscripts, sketches and drafts, secondary copies, early printed editions. Then there is performance, for the actual act of music-making is a continuing and constantly developing part of the heritage, preserved in sound recordings (and sound combined with a visual record), and also in the existence of historic instruments. Performance history has its own records: concert tickets, programmes, handbills, posters, promotional literature (musicians, musical organizations, publishers) and other sources of reportage (contemporary descriptions, criticism). More broadly, there is the literature of music: books, periodicals, journal and newspaper articles. The iconography of music is a large category, comprising drawings, paintings and other representations, photographs, statues, busts and masks, and portrayals of scenes of music-making and other relevant events. Then there are documentary records relating to musicians: birth, marriage and death certificates, school reports, passports, certificates of diplomas, degrees, memberships or awards, correspondence and diaries; related to these are commemorative objects, such as medals, wreaths, presentation items and various kinds of memorial such as plaques and tombstones. Lastly, there are artefacts connected, usually through ownership, with musicians and music-making: furniture, writing equipment, reading glasses, utensils and ornaments, clothing, and the actual premises in which composers lived. It is these last, in particular, that form the subject of this essay.

The standard repositories of musical heritage are of course national, regional, ecclesiastical and academic libraries, archives and museums. For most composers of the past, the bulk of manuscripts and important early printed editions have generally found their way into such institutions, although a significant number remain in private collections. Other source material, such as letters, documents and personal artefacts, has not been so methodically collected. Some composer museums have collections that enable them to vary their displays from time to time, but only a relatively modest number hold significant quantities of primary source material. A few, in particular those attached to research institutes or libraries, or the recipients of important private collections, have developed, or in some cases inherited through familial links, important archival collections of their own. While acquiring and preserving material for posterity, as libraries and archives do, museums seek in addition to interpret their collections for a range of audiences, young and old, the novice and the informed visitor.

Birthplaces, deathplaces, workplaces

Composer museums and memorial rooms occupy buildings of all sorts. A large majority are, of course, in the actual houses where the composers were born, where they lived – for anything from a few months to 30 years or more – or where they died. Most of the truly great composers from Schütz to the end of the 19th century who are commemorated at all are commemorated at the houses of their birth, where those houses survive: among them are Handel, Bach (the actual birthplace is unknown, but the commemorative house is at least close by), Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Verdi (possibly the wrong house), Smetana, Bruckner, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Elgar, Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov. For most of the notable absentees from that list there is at least a plaque to indicate the site, if it is known. Many of the rather lesser composers represented in this volume, of that era and beyond, are also remembered at their birthplaces, with plaques and sometimes busts or statues. Broadly speaking, birthplace museums tend to be general rather than specialist, and to include some account of the composer's entire life, not merely the years spent in the house.

For all the sentimental connotations of a birthplace, a place of death offers greater scope for evocation, and a museum that commemorates long residence may tell us more about the composer's way of life than one at which he happens to have been born. The way of life of early composers – most were fairly mobile, and they often lived in staff quarters of some sort – makes them difficult to commemorate. Handel's period of 36 years at his chosen London house is a striking exception, and in itself predictive of a new relationship between the composer and society. Of the houses or flats commemorating the Classical Viennese composers only Haydn's, at Eisenstadt and Vienna, represent reasonably long-term spells of residence. Handel and Haydn both died in their town houses, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in buildings that no longer stand. But the circumstances of Beethoven's death are presented in the museum displays at Heiligenstadt, in north Vienna, and in the centre of the city the pathetic circumstances of Schubert's are even more movingly brought home in the actual flat where he died, asking to hear Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet played in the room next to the tiny one in which he lay.

Many other images of composers' deaths are evoked in these museums, not exclusively in the actual places of death. In this, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Italian opera composers' museums excel. A room at Rossini's birthplace relates the circumstances of his death, with the famous Doré engraving, his burial and reburial. The room in which Donizetti spent his last days is evoked by the presentation of his deathbed and his invalid chair; nearby, his last portrait, in which he is seated in the chair, provides graphic corroboration as much by the tactful omission of the chair's tray and headrest as by its faithful reproduction of its other salient features. The museum also displays the black tailcoat in which he was first buried, recovered 'almost intact' at his exhumation. The Bellini birthplace museum goes further, displaying the coffin in which he was interred in Paris before the exhumation and return of his remains to Sicily. In the Verdi museum at his villa, Sant' Agata, the room in which he died in the Hotel Grand et de Milan is re-created, with the original furniture; there is also an account of his death in one of the Busseto museums, and it is possible to visit both the hotel room where he died and his grave in the Casa di Riposo for musicians that he established in Milan. Spontini too was buried in a retirement home of his own creating in Maiolati (his kindliness and munificence towards his native village compares interestingly with his reputation for mean behaviour in the wider world). For Puccini no extra excursion is needed: he and other family members are interred within the museum itself at Torre del Lago, in the chapel of his villa.

Wagner, of course, met his death in Venice, and that is duly commemorated in the Ca' Vendramin Calergi, where he had been living: the staircase can be seen down which he was borne to the lugubre gondola to start his journey back to Bayreuth, where he is buried in the garden of what is now the Wagner museum. Close by, the house in which Liszt died, rebuilt after wartime destruction, is also a museum. At Bonn, the asylum in which Schumann died, now a public music library, has two rooms to commemorate him. The St Florian monastery in Austria, with which Bruckner was closely associated all his life, displays his deathbed in one of the rooms open to the public and his actual coffin in the crypt of the Stiftkirche. Several other Austrian composers' deaths are particularly commemorated – Lehár's, Koschat's and Einem's – by the re-creation of the rooms in which they died (or simply their maintenance as they were), and in the Franz Schmidt memorial rooms the visitor may find himself sitting on the sofa on which the composer's body was rested when he died. Other strong death images include the jacket worn by the Latvian Emils Darzinš? when he was struck and killed in a railway accident, the desk on to which the Romanian Tudor Ciortea fell as he died and the sofa on which the Ukrainian Mykola Leontovych was shot (the bullet hole is clearly to be seen).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from CALLING ON THE COMPOSER by Julie Anne Sadie Stanley Sadie Copyright © 2005 by Julie Anne Sadie and Stanley Sadie. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Illustration Acknowledgments....................ix
Introduction....................xi
I Heritage and the Composer Museum....................1
II Celebrating Composers....................23
III A Fragile Legacy....................35
IV Music on Display....................57
The Composer Houses and Museums....................69
By country: maps....................71
By composer: A-Z....................89
Epilogue....................413
Index of Places....................419
Index of Persons....................424