The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe by Samantha Owens (review)

There can be few fontes artis musicae more fascinating than the so-called 'commonplace' book of John Sigismond Cousser (1660-1727). Not that this manuscript 'notebook', as Samantha Owens rightly renames it, is a source of music itself. Rather, it is a cornucopia of information, written by Cousser during the last thirty years of his life and running to 450 pages, concerning his own activities and interests, and subjects relevant to almost any composer or performer in early eighteenth-century Europe. Possibly the most valuable feature of Owens's excellent study is a series of four appendices that give insights into the riches of this unique document. The first is a summary of the contents of the whole, the second an annotated edition of Cousser's address book (523 entries). Much of the notebook is devoted to musical topics such as instruments, theory, music-making, musicians, publishers, and copyists, but there are also lists of the music, librettos, and other books that Cousser possessed; his books of cantatas, madrigals, duets, and serenatas are listed in the third appendix, his inventory of ouverture incipits in the fourth. Recipes and remedies were of particular interest, along with inns and spas, postal and transport services, and much other information relating to travel. Cousser kept 'notes on what a virtuoso has to observe, upon coming to London', inventoried some of the contents of his residence in Dublin, and made notes for a trip in 1716 to London and the continent (Appendix 5). His book was acquired by Yale University in 1951 and is accessible at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu [accessed 15 March 2019] (under 'Kusser'): the site deserves many hits.

If the notebook is still, by and large, unexplored, its author is also partly unknown or obscure. His Hungarian father, Ján Kusser, was a successful composer, conductor, and teacher with a substantial music collection, who in 1674 became music director of the Stiftskirche in Stuttgart. Stuttgart is probably where Cousser first encountered the French style. According to Walther (1732), he 'spent six years in Paris and had the good fortune to be highly favoured by the world-famous Lully'. In the absence of documentary evidence, this statement is supported by Cousser's compositions, which confirm that he studied Lully's music. This must have been between 1674 and 1680, when Cousser was in his teens, and before the publication of his Composition de musique suivant la méthode françoise contenant Six Ouvertures de theatre accompagnées de plusieurs Airs (Stuttgart, 1682).

Between 1680 and 1704, Cousser held several appointments in various parts of Germany. When the Composition de musique was published, he was a 'musician' at the Stuttgart court; in 1682-1683, he probably accompanied other Stuttgart musicians to Ansbach, for the marriage of a Württemberg prince and a Brandenburg princess. By the summer of 1690, he was serving as Kapellmeister to Duke Anton Ulrich at Wolfenbüttel, where he learnt about Italian opera from the singers. According to Mattheson (1728), he was responsible for taking 'the new or Italian art of singing' to Hamburg: Cousser worked at the Goose Market Theatre from early 1694, eventually becoming manager of the opera. When he left, in 1696, he set up his own touring company and took opera to Kiel, Nuremberg, and Augsburg. By 1700 (possibly 1698), he was back in Stuttgart, visiting Italy in 1701, but in 1704 he gave up the job and headed north to London. After two-and-a-half years, he set off again, this time to Dublin, where he arrived in mid-1707. Walther observed that it was owing to 'his volatile and passionate temperament' that 'he did not remain anywhere for long': in Wolfenbüttel, Cousser had quarrelled with the librettist Friedrich Christian Bressand, and in Hamburg with Jacob Kremberg, so maybe Walther was right.

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