Tea at Trianon: Musical Instruments of 16th- and 17th-Century Music

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Musical Instruments of 16th- and 17th-Century Music

From Interlude:

We were looking at some music title pages from a collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale and found some interesting representations of music as part of the title page designs. In this title page for a book of keyboard music from 1670, little putti hold up a banner with the title. At the center bottom is a music book, to be tied closed with ribbons, flanked by a two-manual harpsichord on the left (without its legs), and a virginal, normally played on a tabletop, on the right. On the back wall, from the left, are wind instruments, including a cornett in curved wood, a recorder, and a racket, shown with its distinctive cylindrical body. To the right is a guitar. On the other side of the banner is a lute and then a viol with a pointed Baroque bow laid over the top.
The publishers Le Roy and Ballard, founded by Adrian Le Roy and his cousin Robert Ballard in 1551, used title-page frames filled with instruments and player: sat the top right, Justice wealds her sword, and below her, are two putti playing viols. Music books frame the grotesque at the bottom centre. Two more putti inhabit the bottom left corner, playing two more viols. All together, the four putti give us an entire consort of viols, from large to small. In the top right corner, an unreadable label seems to indicate a female mathematician specialising in geometry, with her book of drawings and a T-square. (Read more.)