(b Avignon, France, May 18, 1854; d Versailles, France, May 20, 1933). Organist, composer, collector, and writer on musical instruments. Born a count into an old Norman family, he studied organ with Gigout in Paris in the late 1880s and was admitted to the Académie des Sciences Morales, des Lettres et des Arts de Versailles in 1891. Beginning in 1897, de Bricqueville played the organ in the chapel of the palace of Versailles for about 20 years. Writing as a music critic, he enthusiastically promoted Wagner but also appreciated earlier French opera. His studies of historical instruments, instrument collecting, and music iconography, while largely superseded by later research, offer valuable insight to the state of scholarship at the turn of the 20th century. He described his private collection of instruments (mainly European of the preceding three centuries) in three published catalogues, the last being Catalogue sommaire de la collection d’instruments de musique anciens formée par le Cte de Bricqueville...
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Carlida Steffan
(b Bassano del Grappa, nr Vicenza, July 12, 1848; d Bassano del Grappa, June 23, 1916). Italian writer on music. After graduating in law from the University of Padua (1871), he studied the cello, flute and guitar; he also became an outstanding performer on the lute, which led him to investigate the structure, tuning and repertory of that instrument.
Chilesotti owned a large collection of 16th- and 17th-century tablatures, both printed and manuscript, and was a pioneer in transcribing lute music. His methods were interpretative, in that he picked out the implied polyphony in the tablature and retained the single staff in transcription, using a treble clef. In order for the music to be performed on the guitar he employed a false tuning in E rather than the original tuning in G or A. Many scholars were critical of these choices, finding the transcriptions too guitar-like. Chilesotti’s two principal publications, the ...
