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There
is, in the National Archives of the French Republic, a document of
exceptional interest for the history of the violin trade: the inventory of
musical instruments seized by the revolutionaries in Paris in 1792.
1792
was the apex of the French Revolution, the year of its desperate fight to
survive on a path to self destruction, the year when “the fatherland was
threatened” by an onslaught of outraged neighboring monarchies following
the execution of King Louis XVI and his Austrian wife,
Marie-Antoinette.
It was the year young volunteers massively and successfully rushed to
defend the borders, and “Terror” was the brutal answer of the
“incorruptible” Robespierre to the risk of civil war inside the
homeland. It was also a year of the most innovative and progressive
decisions, the implementation of the metric system for instance, and the
abolition of slavery in the colonies. These decisions were made by the “Convention”,
the elected assembly, which briefly ruled the country, and ushered in the
modern face of France - and the future Napoleonic Europe - on the ruins of
the Ancien Régime.
Among
the many “Commissions” created by the Convention, to
deal with the innumerable problems inherited or invented by the
Revolution, there was one in charge of the Fine Arts, which besides a lot
of other matters, addressed the question of what to do with the treasures
found in the mansions of the thousands of aristocrats, who had either
fled, or were condemned to the guillotine. And a
sub-sub-commission, chaired by Antonio Bruni, was appointed specifically
to inventory and appraise the musical instruments.
The
Bruni report inventories only some one hundred Parisian households,
representing, at best a small sample of the French aristocracy’s musical
estate at the time. Nevertheless this sample includes a sizeable number of
items, something like four hundred altogether, and is quite probably
statistically representative.
The
majority of the instruments are keyboard: a few organs, but mostly
harpsichords and fortepianos, in approximately equal numbers. While
the sixty some harpsichords (including a few spinets) are of various ages
from the most ancient, made in 1606 by H. Ruckers in Amsterdam, to the
most recent, from Broadwood in London, and only a few years old, the five
dozen fortepianos were of course all recent, mostly made in the 1780’s,
with a few Erard of 1790, being practically brand new. It was clearly the
fashion for rich families in these years to buy a piano, which was often
imported from England. Witness a 1786 Zimmerman, seized from the estate of
the hapless Lavoisier, who was an illustrious scientist, but also Fermier
Général, i.e. tax collector for the Crown, and as such condemned and
beheaded, after the King attempted to take refuge abroad.
In
second position by numbers behind keyboards rank string instruments: 74
violins, 21 violas (and quintons), as well as 24 cellos or
“bass”. These proportions do not suggest a selective attrition of
instruments, which would have been easier to hide, take away, or steal.
The number of guitars, relatively high (20), and of harps (18), mostly
recent and made in Paris, is comparable to that of woodwinds (23 flutes
etc…). Brass instruments are represented only by some ten hunting horns:
just as in our day, trumpets, trombones and tubas do not connote the posh
upper class.
If
we consider more precisely the violin family, and analyze the
composition of the sample in terms of provenance, we find:
A dozen
of Old Italian instruments (including 7 of the Amati dynasty, a few from
the seventeenth century, 3 of the Guarneri family, and one Stradivari)
Some 10
German, Austrian or Tyrolean instruments (including 5 Steiner or
“said” Steiner (already!) and one Klotz)
Besides
a Compostano (?), a Jaurch (??) and a Turkish bass from Constantinople
(???) (but strangely, nothing from the British Isles)
the rest, about 100 instruments, mostly French and recent,
especially as regards the cellos – exhibit the whole pageant of the
Parisian luthiers of the second half of the eighteenth century: Lambert,
Guersan, Castagnery, Bassot and so on.
To
be noted: there are no “vieux Paris” such as Bocquay and
Pierray. Were they already out of fashion, and thus had disappeared into
attics? Possibly that is the case, although it must also be remembered
that many of the instruments are “unlabelled”.
Now
for the most intriguing, if not astonishing, part of the 1792 inventory:
the appraisals Bruni and his colleagues put on the value of these
instruments. While many pianofortes commanded estimates in excess of 1000
Francs, one finds an Andrea Guarnerius violin valued at 200 Francs, a
Steiner at 150, some Amatis for a mere 100 Francs or less, a
“napolitan” violin for 20 only. One reads for instance, at the
D’Ormesson household, “a small Amati, a small Guarnerius, a viola and
a bass, 50 Francs for the lot”! As for a 1710 Stradivarius viola, it
receives no special notice, not even an estimate…
Jules
Gallay, the cellist and musical essayist who, about a century later,
published the Bruni Commission 1792 inventory of musical instruments
seized by the French revolutionaries at the homes of aristocrats, thought
that Bruni’s appraisals were total fancy, and deplored his incompetence.
We do not share his opinion.
Of
course, in 1792, Duport had been playing his (now) celebrated Stradivarius
cello for some time, and ten years had elapsed already since Viotti’s
debut in Paris, and the success he had scored at the Concert Spirituel
with his 1712 Strad. During these years Viotti had not only inspired
Tourte’s definitive model for the bow, but also trained the new
generation of violin players, the Baillot, Rode, Kreutzer who were to
found the school of the French Conservatoire - another lasting creation
from the Convention - which later ruled the European romantic performance
style. In fact Viotti himself had just fled the Revolution and was trying
to resume his musical career in London. Bruni,
an Italian violin and viola player, and a successful conductor established
in France since 1779, was certainly no stranger to these trends. It
seems unbelievable, especially considering the presence of notable
instrument makers and dealers like Cousineau or Leduc acting as experts on
the Bruni Commission, with the risks they would have taken in cheating,
that the appraisals they undersigned could have been far removed from the
then current market values. Indeed
it must be remarked that these estimates are quite coherent. If, to make a
try at a comparison with our contemporary rates, we multiply the Franc
value by 10 and express the result in £, we obtain the following averages
(and brackets):
·
flutes: £
300 (60 to 4,000)
·
guitars: £
600 (60 to 1,200)
·
violins: £
850 (80 to 10,000)
·
cellos: £
1,150 (500 to 1,800)
·
harpsichords:
£ 3,550 (600 to 20,000)
·
harps: £
4,500 (1,600 to 10,000)
·
pianos
(new): £ 9,000 (3,000 to 80,000)
This
is not really different from what we would observe in any auction
catalogue today, were it not to include any prestigious Italian string
instruments. Of course the difference is that the Bruni catalogue did
include quite a few. The
inescapable conclusion is, that as late as the last decade of the
eighteenth century, ancient masters’ instruments, and notably those of
the Cremonese, did not at all enjoy the prestige, and the enormous
plus-values, which they must have acquired later, in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Finding a Stradivarius at the Fermier Général
Boulogne’s was simply nothing special… just as in Gallay’s time
it was nothing special to buy a painting by Van Gogh for less than 100
Francs!
What
did the revolutionaries do with all these instruments? Where are they now?
These are questions that Gallay had already investigated over a century
ago. Initially the instruments were consigned at the Menus Plaisirs, a
depot on rue Bergère, which location the Conservatoire much later
abandoned for rue de Madrid, near rue de Rome, still a landmark of music
and lutherie. The catalogue of the collection of the Conservatoire
- now harboured in the museum of the Cité de la Musique in La
Villette – contains no record however of the Bruni instruments, just as
in Gallay’s time. Gallay wondered if they had been transferred to
another depot, like Cluny, or the Abbaye St Martin, where another
Conservatory, the Arts et Métiers, which had been created by the Convention,
and which still exists, along with its museum. It is not altogether
impossible that one day some forgotten crates, full of string instruments,
will be found in some cellar here or there...
But
unfortunately it is much more likely that the instruments where dispersed
early, after the Revolution ended. In 1794, following the assassination of
Robespierre, in the “revulsing sales of everything that belonged to the émigrés,
the condamnés, the ruinés, in the Paris of the Directoire
when the great city was but a vast auction closing out the guillotine”
write the brothers Goncourt. Unless they shared the fate of the twenty-two
old harpsichords mentioned in another document of the French National
Archives, which should have constituted the embryo of a museum collection,
but instead were burned to heat the classrooms when the Ecole Royale de
Musique – the restoration name for the Conservatoire – was
reopened in 1816, yet another telltale sign of the respect they had to
this date for the value of antiques. ###
Alain
Giraud, a French scientist, who at various times in
his career studied and taught in the United States, (Ann Arbor, Michigan;
Stanford, California,) started playing and collecting string instruments
when he retired at sixty. He published an article on François Chanot’s
1820 innovative design in the September 2004 issue of the Strad magazine,
and collaborated on Sylvette Milliot’s new book about J.B. Vuillaume. He
presently lives in London.
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