E. Michotte, Une soirée chez Rossini à Beau-Séjour (Passy), 1858 (Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, B-Bc, FEM-801)
The Edmond Michotte collection is a donation to the Royal Conservatory of Brussels phased between 1897 and 1913, by the Belgian homonymous composer and musicographer, of an important part of the private library of Rossini with whom he became friendly.
Starting its activities in 1813, the Royal Conservatory of Brussels received its official name in 1832. Providing performing music and drama courses, the institution became renowned partly because of the international reputation of its successive directors such as François-Joseph Fétis, François-Auguste Gevaert, Edgar Tinel, Joseph Jongen or Marcel Poot, but more because it has been attended by many of the top musicians, actors and artists in Belgium such as Arthur Grumiaux, José Van Dam, Sigiswald Kuijken, Josse De Pauw, Luk van Mello and Luk De Konink. Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, also studied at the Brussels Conservatory.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.
Born into a wealthy Belgian noble family, Edmond Michotte (1831–1914) was educated in Belgium and Paris. Back in his home country after the 1848 revolution, he chose to start music studies after an aborted bachelorship in Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. A pianist and composer, he gained a wide reputation as a performer on the mattauphone[1] virtuoso. From 1854 he lived between Brussels and Paris, where he moved in the celebrity circles of the musical crowd and became acquainted with Rossini – then almost forty years his senior – who considered him as his quasi figlio. After having had the opportunity to attend the meeting of the composer with Richard Wagner, he published a short review of the event.[2] Back in Belgium in 1870, he became a member of several associations and presided over the vigilance committee of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels to which he donated his vast Rossinian collection in subsequent phases. He died in 1914 after a missile hit his house in Leuven, without having achieved his ambition to dedicate a museum to his illustrious friend and protector.
The Free University of Brussels was a university in Brussels, Belgium. Founded in 1834 on the principle of "free inquiry", its founders envisaged the institution as a free-thinker reaction to the traditional dominance of Catholicism in Belgian education. The institutions was avowedly secular and particularly associated with Liberal political movements during the era of pillarisation. The Free University was one of Belgium's major universities, together with the Catholic University of Leuven and the universities of Ghent, and Liège.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Leuven or Louvain is the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant in Belgium. It is located about 25 kilometres east of Brussels. The municipality itself comprises the historic city and the former neighbouring municipalities of Heverlee, Kessel-Lo, a part of Korbeek-Lo, Wilsele and Wijgmaal. It is the eighth largest city in Belgium and the fourth in Flanders with more than 100,244 inhabitants.
Appreciated by Rossinian scholars[3] for the rarity of certain documents, the Michotte collection essentially contains pieces from Rossini's library: handwritten and printed scores, books, libretti and various publications, correspondence, iconographic material and various objects.
Autographs and printed scores
The collection contains close to 300 musical manuscripts, amongst which 26 are autograph; the majority of these are works by Rossini, including 180 compositions pertaining to the lyrical repertoire – mostly unedited airs, fragments or variations – written for the soprano Isabella Colbran (1785–1845), his first wife and creator of major roles, as well as vocal and instrumental music.
Isabella Angela Colbran was a Spanish opera singer known in her native country as Isabel Colbrandt. Many sources note her as a dramatic coloratura soprano but some believe that she was a mezzo-soprano with a high extension, a soprano sfogato. She collaborated with opera composer Gioachino Rossini in the creation of a number of roles that remain in the repertory to this day; they were married on 22 March 1822. She was the composer of four collections of songs.
The collection includes the handwritten score of Matilde di Shabran (1821) – a minor work of the composer, but the only one in Belgium.[4] which sheds light on the evolution of Rossini's bel canto.
Matilde di Shabran is a melodramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini to a libretto by Jacopo Ferretti after François-Benoît Hoffman’s libretto for Méhul’s Euphrosine and J. M. Boutet de Monvel's play Mathilde. The opera was first performed in Rome at the Teatro Apollo, 24 February 1821 conducted by the violinist Niccolo Paganini. The premiere was followed by a street brawl "between Rossini's admirers and his detractors."
Among some forty manuscripts from other composers is the autograph version of Six Polonaises D824, op. 61 from Schubert although no information is available as to how it became part of Rossini's library.
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 , the Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 , the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.
Books, libretti and various publications
The Michotte collection also comprises 420 titles of musical editions, of which approximately 120 are by Rossini, and 300 Italian or French publications from the XIXe century, as well as a complete edition of the works of J.S. Bach and of Beethoven's symphonies. It is complemented by a precious collection of libretti of the first performances of Rossini, carefully assembled and bound by his father.
Other publications, many of which contain a dedication to Rossini, are of a different nature, but undoubtedly belonged to the shelves of the musician, such as the 1818 edition of Dante's Divina Commedia and the Répertoire général du théâtre français.
Monographs and press articles concerning Rossini, several printed programmes of the Soirées musicales – private concerts organised in Paris by the composer and his second wife Olympe Pélissier – give witness to the esthetic taste of the time.
The collection includes more than two hundred letters and different handwritten texts – invitations, programs, poetry, furniture inventories, condolences, or the impressive list of celebrities attending the composer's funeral. The correspondence, of which half is autograph, holds some thirty letters from Rossini to his Bolognese secretary, Angelo Mignani, the others being addressed to the composer himself.
Iconographic material and various objects
The iconographic part of the collection, representing some hundred fifty images, covers lithographs of the young Rossini, photos – some by Nadar – of the old artist, his funeral and his exhumation, or of portraits of his parents, as well as some engravings featuring Colbran.
The personal objects in this section include a fan-formed vase with seven musical quotations from Rossini, representing the allegory of the « swan of Pesaro», next to a miniature biscuit bust, a paper cutter, a pince-nez and a tie-pin offered by Bellini.
Allegorical vase representing Rossini as the "swan of Pesaro" backed by seven musical quotations (Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, E. Michotte collection)
Bibliography
Alfred Wotquenne, « Liste des dons faits à la bibliothèque du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles 1896-1898 », Annuaire du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles 1897-1998, p.105.
Victor Mahillon, « Liste des dons faits au Musée du Conservatoire 1901 », Annuaire du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles 1902, 26, 1902, pp.156–157.
Alfred Wotquenne, Catalogue de la bibliothèque du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, voll. 4, Bruxelles, 1912.
Edouard Grégoir, « Michotte, Edmond », Les artistes-musiciens belges au XVIIIe et XIXe siècle, 3 voll., Bruxelles, 1885–1887, vol. I, pp.314–315, 485.
Thierry Levaux, Dictionnaire des compositeurs de Belgique du Moyen-Age à nos jours, Ohain-Lasne, Editions Art in Belgium, 2006.
Johan Eeckeloo, « Il Musée Rossini », Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi, Rossini e Michotte, 2004, pp.7–52.
Olivia Wahnon de Oliviera, « La collection Rossini de la bibliothèque du Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles augmentée de deux documents autographes », Revue Belge de Musicologie, no 67, 2013, pp.283–290.
Philip Gossett, « Rossini Autographs in the Fonds Edmond Michotte of the Brussels Conservatory », Revue Belge de Musicologie, no 68, 2014, pp.19–42.
Edmond Michotte, Une soirée chez Rossini à Beau-Séjour (Passy) 1858, Bruxelles, 1893.
Edmond Michotte, La visite de R. Wagner à Rossini, Paris 1860, Bruxelles, 1906.
Notes
↑ Instrument developed by Joseph Mattau, inspired by Benjamin Franklin's famous glass harmonica, made of a leg-mounted box containing a series of water-filled glasses that resonate when their edge is rubbed with the hand or the finger.
↑ Edmond Michotte, La visite de Wagner à Rossini, Paris 1860, Bruxelles, 1906.
↑ E.g. Philip Gossett, who explored the Michotte collection in Brussels in 2014 (cf. bibliography).
↑ The Italian musicologist Rita Marchetti, having analyzed and compared this manuscript to the edition of the score in Rome in 1821 (also present in the Michotte collection), has ascertained the absence of nine scenes.
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