[Thanks to Project Music Cataloger Christina Linklater for contributing this post.]
In 1794, a governmental decree led to the foundation of a new music publishing firm in Paris. The company’s full name, Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales, indicates that this was a practical enterprise, one of many new initiatives brought forth as the fervor of the French Revolution yielded to the experiments of the modern era. As Constant Pierre wrote in his 1895 history of the Magasin de musique, the firm’s preeminent purpose was to furnish “chants et romances civiques inspirés par la haine de la tyrannie et l’amour saint de la liberté.”
The John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection at the Houghton Library includes nine patriotic songs for voice and piano published by the Magasin between 1794 and 1796. One such ballad, by composer Hyacinthe Jadin and poet Ange Etienne Xavier de La Chabeaussière, reflects the agrarian ethos of Revolutionary France. Entitled “Chanson pour la Fête de l’agriculture,” it is a short and cheerful ditty in F major singing the praises of “Noble travail! belle industrie!” The small green ownership stamp in the bottom left corner indicates that this item once belonged to the twentieth-century French pianist and composer Alfred Cortot.
Perhaps most arresting among the Magasin de musique materials in the Ward Collection are the contracts for its repurposing as a composer-run publishing house in 1802 and its dissolution in 1811, unique manuscripts ending in the signatures of its members and covered in tax stamps, interlinear remarks, and hasty inventories. In the earlier document we see Luigi Cherubini, Etienne Nicolas Méhul, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Pierre Rode, Nicolo Isouard, and François Adrien Boieldieu signing on to be members of the Magasin de musique, consenting to the terms set out in 13 articles (among them: each member was required to contribute at least one new work per year unless prevented by illness or by “autre empêchement jugé légitime par la majorité”; membership was non-transferable; and if a disagreement within the society reached an impasse, fellow composers André-Ernest-Auguste Grétry and Nicolas Dalayrac would be brought in as impartial arbitrators). The earlier document is dated Thermidor 17th, year 10 of the Republic, while the dissolution is simply dated October 15th, 1811, the confounding Republican calendar having fallen out of use by 1805.
Initially intended to supply patriotic music for the many new festivals enacted in France, the Magasin de musique would expand its scope to include publishing operas by its member composers and providing didactic materials to the new Conservatoire de Paris (“et du conservatoire” was appended to the Magasin’s original name shortly after it was founded). The Ward Collection contains a Magasin de musique edition of Cherubini’s opera Anacréon, ou, L’amour fugitif, published in 1803 and housed at Harvard’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. Note the stamp on the title page, a six-pointed star with the name of a Magasin de musique member inscribed in each arm.
“Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales et du conservatoire: a Selection from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection” is on exhibit in Houghton Library’s Chaucer Case (on the ground floor) from February 11th.