François-Joseph Fétis, Correspondance (review)

Joseph-François Fétis's contribution to the musical world of his time has only relatively recently come to be fully appreciated. In the late nineteenth century and also into the twentieth he had a reputation as a dry, conservative pedant and was also tainted with the stain of dishonesty; not only was he a book thief, but in his massive biographical music dictionary he sometimes made up information if he did not have it to hand.

Thanks to a number of scholars, the author of this edition of correspondence himself, Peter Bloom, Katharine Ellis, and others, Fétis's real achievements are now appreciated, and from whatever angle one looks, his accomplishments are nothing short of phenomenal. How many musicologists today could claim to their credit a music appreciation text (La Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde) that was translated into five languages, to have founded and virtually single-authored an influential music journal, put out two editions of a multi-volume biographical dictionary of musicians, and written a multi-volume history of music (five out of eight volumes complete on his death)? Fétis also wrote many other books (including a treatise on harmony), was a renowned authority on organology and on early church music, and is seen by many as the founder of comparative musicology, being one of the first Western musicologists to take seriously the music of other cultures and to establish connections between musicology and anthropology (see Émile Haraszti, 'Fétis fondateur de la musicologie comparée: Son étude sur un nouveau mode de classification des races humaines dàprès leurs systèmes musicaux. Contribution à l'oeuvre de Fétis', Acta Musicologica, 4 (1932), 97-103).

This volume of correspondence is beautifully presented. The letters are spaciously reproduced with excellent editorial notes at the bottom of each letter. Sometimes a footnote providing biographical information occurs many pages after the person has been first cited (see Marie Pleyel, p. 275 n. 3), but this does not happen often. Each letter is given a number corresponding to the year it was written; for instance, the ten letters for 1831 have headings in the left-hand corner of 31-1, 31-2, and so on. Given the quantity of letters in the volume this system of numbering is very practical. However, there is no complete listing of all the letters, which is a pity since such listings are useful, particularly when seeking to get a quick overview of who Fétis was writing to in a particular year. There is an excellent preface, a list of all the correspondents with brief biographical notes, a list of the forty-four archives consulted, and an index of proper names. Some of the index entries would have benefited from subdivision and it would have been helpful to have also included a bibliography of all of Fétis's published works. The Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom has alerted me to the fact that Letter no. 42-8 is misattributed to Berlioz and should be attributed, instead, to another 'H.B.', Henri Berton. As Bloom observes, 'in 1842 Berlioz was not yet an Officier de la légion d'honneur', so it is not logistically possible that this letter is by Berlioz (pers. com. Sept. 2007).

Fétis's correspondence reveals a man who was absolutely driven. As he claimed on a number of occasions, he worked fifteen to sixteen hours a day. He was a man with a mission; he wanted to leave behind a volume of literature that would educate and provide information both on his contemporaries and also on music and musicians of the past. He comments in a letter to the Italian musician Pier-Angelo Minoli: 'Voilà ce que je me suis dit toujours dans ma vie qui a été un long combat; au milieu de mes tribulations, il me restait la ferme volonté pour accomplir ce que je considérais comme l'oeuvre de ma...