Aulica No 17 - Les derniers musiciens du roi, 1761-1792
Youri Carbonnier, Les derniers musiciens du roi, 1761-1792, joint publication Centre de recherche du château de Versailles / Presses universitaires de Rennes (“Histoire” collection, “Aulica. L’Univers de la cour” series), February 2025, 16,5 × 24 cm, 346 pages, index, €25 (ISBN: 978-2-7535-9679-5).
Abstract
As the monarchy cast its last rays across the realm, the King’s Music continued to seek excellence by bringing together, just as in the Grand Siècle, the best musicians and singers to be found, in both the kingdom and beyond. Italian castratos, choir boys and powerfully-voiced singers formed a magnificent choir, which was much admired by Leopold Mozart. The orchestra, meanwhile, was not to be outdone, its virtuosos, including a young Rodolphe Kreutzer , able to “play the music at first sight, no matter how difficult”. Every day, in the chapel, at the opera or in the salons, the music composed by the stars of this elite group echoed through the royal residences. The majority of these musicians lived at Versailles, where they formed a close-knit, homogeneous social group, bound by strong ties that went beyond mere musical complicity: marriages, whether happy or otherwise, patronage, and friendships all blossomed into a sociability that extended to all those who served at court or lived in the neighbourhood. These 400 or so men and women give us a glimpse of their home life, opening the door a fraction onto their culture and their feelings. And with a part to play in royal ceremony, they also provide us with an unusual view of urban society in the last decades of France’s Ancien Régime.
Youri Carbonnier, is a teaching fellow with a PhD in modern history from l’université d’Artois (Arras). Specialising in towns and cities of the early modern period, his current interest lies in musicians in France in the 18th century. He is involved in the construction of the Muséfrem prosopographical database] dedicated to church musicians in France at the end of the Ancien Régime.
To order the book
