Madame Lavoisier's Music Collection: Lessons from a Private Library of the Nineteenth Century

Throughout her life, Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier, Madame de Rumford (1758–1836) joined intellectual pursuits with sociability and the arts. Her formidable skills in music are apparently on display in the large collection of scores that she amassed during her second marriage; this collection, which has received very little attention until now, survives in the Kroch Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University. This essay considers Madame Lavoisier's collection of music, reflecting on what it might tell us about her tastes and interests in musical practice, as well as about her understanding of the act of collecting per se. These questions are contexualized by considering what is known of her artistic practice, both prior to and following the French Revolution, and how that practice was linked to her work with her first husband, famed chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794).

Sociability was an essential component of the Lavoisiers' work—in chemistry and otherwise—and a framework of sociability underpinned this remarkable couple's engagement with the worlds of the mind and the passions. The Lavoisiers' marriage, with all of its intellectual and artistic production, was central to their projection of an enlightened persona. Madame Lavoisier may have retained this notion of the arts and sciences as complementary and as rooted in a foundation of sociability in the latter decades of her life. Additionally, the contents of her collection and the ways in which it was organized and cataloged are addressed. These factors likewise help to shed light on what Madame Lavoisier's collection of scores signified to her—how she conceived of it, shaped it, and used it.