OVA - MUSIC • FROM LULLY TO STRAVINSKY (AGUTTES)
Wednesday 20 June 2018This catalogue picks over the notes of three centuries of music through the letters and manuscripts of the greatest geniuses: Lully, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Puccini, Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev, Poulenc, and a host of others. Alongside the celebrated music of France, Germany and Austria, the whole of musical Europe parades through these pages. The letters take us into the private lives or workrooms of composers: family letters, letters to friends, business letters, financial concerns, and also letters to librettists, performers and publishers; letters from pupils to masters (Reynaldo HAHN and Ernest MORET to MASSENET), and masters to pupils (the fine correspondence of Darius MILHAUD); or exchanges between musicians, like LISZT’s splendid letter to BERLIOZ.
Une souricière, un allume-gaz, des couteaux de barbier, du savon, une machine à relier et passer chez le métronome. Voilà ce que l’on apprend d’une liste de courses à faire, à Vienne vers 1817, de Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827). “A mousetrap, a gas lighter, barbers’ knives, soap, a binding machine and go to the metronome maker”. This is what we find on a shopping list written in Vienna in around 1817 by Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827). This banal moment in his daily life, immortalised on a scrap of paper, is estimated at between €50,000 and 60,000.
The last item on the list perhaps indicates the date of this autograph. After the death of his brother Kaspar in 1815 in Vienna, Beethoven became guardian to his nephew Karl, then aged nine. In 1816, he entered Karl in the private school of Cajetan Giannattasio del Rio in Vienna. As regards what is described as the “book machine in the gentleman’s brother’s apartment”, this might be a “reading machine”: an adjustable box wooden with tables of letters and a reading shelf used to teach pupils how to read. This would go well with Beethoven’s efforts in around 1817 to properly educate his young nephew. The order for a metronome would corroborate this date: Beethoven took part very early on in MÄLZEL’s work on a metronome, which had just been successfully concluded. Beethoven was the first composer to write works with metronome markings.
Among these moments of daily life, Charles GOUNOD (1818-1893) sent a signed autograph musical acrostic manuscript, “Coeur généreux”, to his friend and doctor, Édouard CABARRUS (1891-1870), with this note: “Having only found the words in my heart, that’s where I have taken them from” (estimate: €250-300).
"Coeur généreux esprit sincère (Generous heart with an honest spirit)
Ami vrai de la vérité ! (True friend of the truth!)
Béni sois tu de me traiter en frère (Blessed are you to treat me as a brother)
A tes doux soins je devrai la santé (I owe my health to your gentle care)
Ris avec moi du confrère maussade (Laugh with me at your gloomy colleague)
Ris et confonds son impuissante dessein !.. (Laugh and confound his impotent designs!)
User le mal sans user le malade (Using the ill without wearing out the ill person)
Sans contredit, c’est être médecin !” (That’s what it means to be a doctor, and no mistake!)
In Vienna, in July-August 1773, when he was 17, Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791) composed a fragment of a Serenade (or Serenata, as he called it; estimate: €120,000-150,000). This piece was probably commissioned as the Finalmusik for the students of Salzburg, perhaps to celebrate the end of the studies of Judas Thaddäus von Antretter (b. 1753), son of the Chancellor of the Salzburg region, who was a friend of the Mozart family.
Several works by Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937) are offered in the sale. One of them is the complete manuscript of La Nuit, composed by Ravel in the spring of 1902 for his third attempt at the Prix de Rome (estimate: €10,000-15,000). Unfortunately, this piece for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra did not win him the famous prize. “La Nuit is an invocation to the healing calm of the night, and its orchestral introduction ventures boldly upon some broad gestures and some striking harmonic surprises. […] The scoring is elaborate and ambitious, and the piece reflects a striving will and a rich imagination, not in any sense the work of a calculating or compromising mind, nor of a miniaturist.” (Hugh Macdonald).
Later in the sale, Ravel sends an amusing postcard to his friend and doctor, who married the daughter of Mallarmé, at the very time the composer was writing his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (estimate: €800-1,000). “Dear friend, you are probably sending your patients to cure their laryngitis in Switzerland. I have found it far cleverer to come and catch it here. I am ingesting codeine… And setting “Soupir” and “Placet futile” to music – voice, string quartet, piano, flutes and clarinets. No tambourines or jingling johnnies... You will hear it soon at the S.M.I. ... unless you refuse me permission, which would greatly sadden me”...
Lastly, an entertaining letter from the daily life of Richard WAGNER (1813-1883), dated 18 November 1878, details an order he is placing with the Parisian couturier FÉLIX for a dress for his wife (estimate: €3,000-4,000). The letter says: “Christmas is coming, and I would ask you to kindly help me provide a few agreeable presents to my wife […] You have perhaps noticed that Mrs Wagner likes to give me the pleasure of seeing her at our private soirées dressed in a highly personal taste.”
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Une souricière, un allume-gaz, des couteaux de barbier, du savon, une machine à relier et passer chez le métronome. Voilà ce que l’on apprend d’une liste de courses à faire, à Vienne vers 1817, de Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827). “A mousetrap, a gas lighter, barbers’ knives, soap, a binding machine and go to the metronome maker”. This is what we find on a shopping list written in Vienna in around 1817 by Ludwig VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827). This banal moment in his daily life, immortalised on a scrap of paper, is estimated at between €50,000 and 60,000.
The last item on the list perhaps indicates the date of this autograph. After the death of his brother Kaspar in 1815 in Vienna, Beethoven became guardian to his nephew Karl, then aged nine. In 1816, he entered Karl in the private school of Cajetan Giannattasio del Rio in Vienna. As regards what is described as the “book machine in the gentleman’s brother’s apartment”, this might be a “reading machine”: an adjustable box wooden with tables of letters and a reading shelf used to teach pupils how to read. This would go well with Beethoven’s efforts in around 1817 to properly educate his young nephew. The order for a metronome would corroborate this date: Beethoven took part very early on in MÄLZEL’s work on a metronome, which had just been successfully concluded. Beethoven was the first composer to write works with metronome markings.
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"Coeur généreux esprit sincère (Generous heart with an honest spirit)
Ami vrai de la vérité ! (True friend of the truth!)
Béni sois tu de me traiter en frère (Blessed are you to treat me as a brother)
A tes doux soins je devrai la santé (I owe my health to your gentle care)
Ris avec moi du confrère maussade (Laugh with me at your gloomy colleague)
Ris et confonds son impuissante dessein !.. (Laugh and confound his impotent designs!)
User le mal sans user le malade (Using the ill without wearing out the ill person)
Sans contredit, c’est être médecin !” (That’s what it means to be a doctor, and no mistake!)
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This sale, n° 8, is organised by AGUTTES
Total number of lots: 134
Global estimate: €350,000
Public auction – Drouot – Room 9
Wednesday 20 June 2018 – 4:30pm
Public exhibition – Drouot – Room 9
Tuesday 12 June – 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 13 June – 11am – 6pm
Thursday 14 June – 11am – 9pm
Friday 15 June – 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 20 June – 11am – 12pm
