Collectionner la musique: Érudits collectionneurs [Collecting Music: Erudite Collectors] ed. by Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Valérie De Wispelaere (review)

This book is the third volume in a series of proceedings from three successive conferences dedicated to the practice of collecting in the field of music. All three of these conferences took place at the Royaumont Foundation in France, an institution that holds the rich collection of musical autographs formerly belonging to the late pianist François Lang (1908–44). The first volume (Collectionner la musique: Histoires d’une passion, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Jean Duron, and Dinko Fabris [Turnhout: Brepols, 2010]), concentrated on the figure of the erudite collector of musical materials in Europe from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The second volume, Collectionner la musique: au cœur de l’interprétation, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, and Jean Duron [Turnhout: Brepols, 2012]), focused on performers who were also collectors, and whose collecting impulse was often an outgrowth of their historical approach to music. The third volume, like the first, is again dedicated to erudite musical collectors from the sixteenth century to the present. The eighteen articles that comprise the third volume are divided, somewhat artificially, into three parts: “Assembling and Constructing Knowledge” (p. 27; all translations are my own), “Erudition and Society” (p. 257), and “Erudite Collectors: Portraits” (p. 359).

Although the majority of the collections described in this volume are composed of books and music scores (both autographs and early editions), some collections also include musical autographs such as composers’ letters, and one article is devoted to collections of musical instruments. All articles are in French, including those by English authors on decidedly non-French topics, such as Graham Sadler’s study of Charles Burney’s music library.

Many of the contributors to the volume share a similar methodology. The author begins with lists or catalogs of works that once made up a music library, a library that may or may not still exist. The author then proceeds to draw various conclusions from these lists in order to shed light on the collector and his possible motives. The analyses of the composition of these collections, however, are necessarily based on a certain amount of guesswork. The absence of instrumental works, for example, may indicate that the collector in question was not himself a practicing musician. But does the appearance of a book or a score in a collection necessarily mean that it was read, studied or used for a performance? Contributors to this volume are sensitive to this question to varying degrees.

In her opening essay, Catherine Massip presents a wide survey of musical collectors, attempting to determine the moment when erudition and the necessary gathering of research materials are transformed into an actual passion for collecting. She does this by analyzing the correspondence of several collectors, for example that between nineteenth-century music publisher Aristide Farrenc (1794–1865) and the collector and music historian Gaetano Gaspari (1807–s81). Massip’s considerable experience as head of the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France over many years is evident, as she retraces the history of collections that have enriched that library from the nineteenth century to the present, placing an emphasis on the dynamism and synergy between private and public collections. Indeed, many articles in the volume retrace the history of private collections that ended up in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, often by way of the library of the Paris Conservatoire, which merged its collections with the larger intuition in 1935. Massip ends her essay by underscoring the role of the individual collector’s judgment, reminding the reader that the word “collection” is derived from the verb colligere, to choose.

Indeed, the choices of some collectors often had far-reaching consequences for music history, preserving works that would later became canonic. Graham Sadler shows how Charles Burney’s daughter Charlotte became the de facto music librarian for her father, helping...