Donor or Patron

[Bertie, Willoughby]

(b Gainsborough, Jan 16, 1740; d Rycote, Sept 26, 1799). English music patron, composer, and political writer. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford (MA 1761) and spent several years in Europe. In Geneva (1765) he met Grétry, who wrote a flute concerto for him based on the improvisations he had played to Grétry to demonstrate his prowess. He spent time in Geneva with the exiled politician John Wilkes and met Voltaire in nearby Ferney. From the mid 1770s he was much involved in the musical and political life of Britain. He was brought into close contact with J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel through his brother-in-law Giovanni Gallini, who was concerned in the organization of the Bach-Abel subscription concerts, which the Earl is said to have subsidized. At his request, Abel composed Four Trios: Two for Two Flutes and a Bass op.16 and J.C. Bach is the author of one of two trios composed for the earl, ‘selected’ and published by Monzani in about ...

(b Berlin, Nov 9, 1723; d Berlin, March 30, 1787). German patron, amateur musician and composer. The youngest sister of Frederick the Great, she seems to have sought and received his advice on musical matters. A music exercise book, dated 1735, which she shared with her sister Luise Ulrike, indicates an early commitment to musical studies, but it is not certain precisely when Amalia’s formal musical training began. By 1740 she and Ulrike were receiving regular instruction from the cathedral organist, Gottfried Hayne (1684–1758), and this continued until 1742. Amalia apparently reached a high level of accomplishment as a player of stringed keyboard instruments and in about 1755 began to devote herself enthusiastically to playing the organ. Although contemporary reports, including her own letters, suggest that she also played the lute, the violin and the flute, they indicate that she was far less proficient on those instruments....

(b Wolfenbüttel, Oct 24, 1739; d Weimar, April 10, 1807). German amateur musician and patron. She was the daughter of Duke Karl I of Brunswick and a niece of Frederick the Great. As a child she was given a good musical education. At the age of 16 she married the 18-year-old Duke Ernst August Konstantin of Saxe-Weimar; after his death two years later until the accession of her eldest son Duke Karl August on 3 September 1775 she conducted the regency. Despite her heavy official responsibilities she cultivated intellectual interests, especially music. She continued to take lessons in composition and keyboard playing from the leading musician in Weimar at that time, Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (later the court Kapellmeister), and gathered round her a group of scholars, poets and musicians, professional and amateur, which was a lively centre of discussion and music-making. In this ‘court of the muses’, as Wilhelm Bode called it, whose members included Wieland, Herder and eventually Goethe, Anna Amalia herself played a significant part in bringing together the poetry of ‘Weimar Classicism’ and the music of the time. J.A. Hiller's most successful Singspiel, ...

[Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna ]

(b Vienna, Nov 2, 1755; d Paris, Oct 16, 1793). Queen of France and patron of opera . The daughter of Emperor Franz I of Austria, she received her early tuition from Gluck (clavecin and singing) and Noverre (dance and deportment). As dauphine (1770) and later queen of France (1774), she supported a great many artists working within the field of opera. The success of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide at the Opéra in 1774 was due largely to the presence of the entire court at the première and to the dauphine’s enthusiastic applause for individual numbers. Accused of favouring Austrian interests too overtly, she was obliged to welcome Piccinni to Paris, and later favoured Sacchini until further criticism forced her to support native composers: for celebrations at Fontainebleau in 1786 Lemoyne’s Phèdre was staged in preference to Sacchini’s Oedipe à Colone. Works by Grétry (...

[Ennal, Charles-Ernest]

(b Fockenhof, Kurland, Feb 14, 1722; d Paris, March 24, 1791). French dilettante, amateur violinist and composer, patron of the arts and instrument collector. A magnificent and very wealthy nobleman, he both amused and astounded his contemporaries. M. Audinot in his comic opera La musicomanie (1779), and possibly E.T.A. Hoffmann in his tale Die Serapionsbrüder (1819), attempted to evoke his strange personality, emphasizing its ridiculous nature.

At the death of his father, a landed nobleman, in 1747, Bagge inherited a large fortune which enabled him to study the violin in Italy with Tartini. By 1750 he had settled in Paris; in the following year he was awarded the title chambellan du Roi de Prusse (then Frederick II) and married the daughter of the Swiss banker Jacob Maudry. With Maudry's death in 1762 the very large inheritance proved a source of contention to the ill-matched couple and they soon separated. Bagge later attempted to gain possession of the inheritance of Mme Maudry, who had died in ...

(b Fonthill, Sept 29, 1760; d Bath, May 2, 1844). English writer, patron and amateur composer. He is chiefly remembered as author of the oriental tale Vathek (1786). Although he was an accomplished performer on the harpsichord and pianoforte, it is unlikely that, as he later claimed, Beckford studied with Mozart when both were children. Beckford met Pacchierotti in Italy in 1780; he encouraged the castrato to return to England to sing at the Italian opera and became one of his most important patrons. For Beckford’s coming-of-age party at his Fonthill estate the following year a cantata (Il tributo) composed by Rauzzini was performed by the composer together with Pacchierotti and Tenducci. Beckford provided music for Elizabeth, Lady Craven’s opera The Arcadian Pastoral (1782), which was written for private performance at Queensberry House in London; his other compositions include an Overture du Ballet de Phaeton...

(b Wiederau, Saxony, Dec 20, 1736; d London, June 9, 1809). German musical dilettante. He is sometimes designated ‘of Martinskirche’ to distinguish him from his cousin Hans Moritz ‘of Seifersdorf’. He was a nephew of the famous minister Count Heinrich Brühl and the son of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Brühl, and served in diplomatic posts in Paris and Warsaw before becoming Saxon ambassador to London in 1764. The count’s marriage (1767) to Lady Egremont, an attendant at the English court, placed him in association with the queen’s retinue of German musicians. He became the patron of, among others, C.F. Horn and the pianist J.S. Schroeter, who dedicated to him his op.1. Clementi’s sonatas op.13 were dedicated to Brühl and Haydn’s canons on the Ten Commandments (hXXVIIa: 1–10) written for him. Brühl himself published a set of six sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment op.1 (...

(b Stuttgart, Feb 11, 1728; d ?Stuttgart, 1793). German patron of music. Educated at the court of Frederick the Great, the young duke began his reign in 1744, emulating the Potsdam court at his own residence in Stuttgart. The court theatre was rebuilt in 1750, and in November 1753 Jommelli was appointed Ober-Kapellmeister. For the next 16 years he wrote and supervised virtually all operas at the court, and during that time assembled one of the best orchestras in Europe. Carl Eugen authorized extensive renovations to the court theatre in Stuttgart between 1756 and 1758, and after being forced to move to Ludwigsburg he built a new Schlosstheater (1765–6). His tastes in opera favoured French-inspired spectacle and dance; Noverre served as his ballet-master from 1760 until 1767, when a mounting deficit forced drastic reductions in personnel. Jommelli left two years later, after the departure of a number of singers including the castrato Giuseppe Aprile. Sacchini was engaged to write an opera in ...

[Carlo]

(b Trent, 1716; d Milan, 1782). Austrian patron of music. Born into a noble family, he studied initially for the priesthood in Bavaria and continued his education in Innsbruck and Salzburg. After travelling in the Netherlands, France and Italy, he was (from 1745) a counsellor to Francis, Maria Theresa’s husband and later Emperor Francis I. In 1758 he became Austrian minister plenipotentiary of Milan, and in this capacity he was responsible for many reforms in science, education and art. During Mozart’s four visits to Milan (1770–73) Firmian was his most important patron: Mozart performed several tunes at his residence, the Palazzo Melzi, and his support was instrumental in the commissioning of many of Mozart’s Milanese works, notably Mitridate, re di Ponto. His opulent lifestyle, library and portrait gallery are described by Burney, who visited Milan in 1770.

[Friedrich II; Frederick the Great]

(b Berlin, Jan 24, 1712; d Potsdam, Aug 17, 1786). German monarch, patron of the arts, flautist and composer. His father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, was alarmed at his son’s early preference for intellectual and artistic pursuits over the military and religious. In spite of being supervised day and night and in the face of his father’s rages and corporal punishments, Frederick managed, partly through the complicity of his mother and his older sister Wilhelmina, to read forbidden books, to affect French dress and manners and to play flute duets with his servant. As a seven-year-old he was permitted to study thoroughbass and four-part composition with the cathedral organist Gottlieb Hayne. Wilhelmina, also musically talented, joined him in impromptu concerts. On a visit to Dresden in 1731 the prince was overwhelmed at hearing his first opera, Hasse’s Cleofide; there he also first heard the playing of the flautist J.J. Quantz, who soon thereafter began making occasional visits to Berlin to give Frederick flute lessons. The king tolerated such amusements for a while, but by ...

(d Eckernförde, Feb 27, 1784). Courtier, adventurer, amateur scientist, inventor and dilettante musician. He purposely concealed his background and identity, and used such pseudonyms as Count Welldone, Prince Ragotzy, Count Bellamare and Count Surmont on his wide travels throughout Europe. Further confusion has arisen with the like-named French general Claude Louis de Saint Germain and with Robert-François Quesnay de Saint Germain, an ardent occultist who may have written the essays La très sainte Trinosofie and La magie sainte (still used by Freemasons) that are attributed to the count. Gerber, alone among the many commentators on Saint Germain’s life (which has many times been made the subject of fiction, by George Sand and Bulwer-Lytton for instance), maintained that he was identical with an obscure violinist and composer in Berlin named Giovannini, but this is improbable. Saint Germain was most likely either the son of Franz Leopold Rákóczi, exiled Prince of Transylvania, or the illegitimate son of Maria-Anna of Neubourg, widow of Charles II of Spain. In his youth he was probably a protégé of the Grand Duke Gian Gastone (the last of the Medicis) and may have studied at Siena University. He appeared in London society from about ...

(b Stockholm, Jan 24, 1746; d Stockholm, March 29, 1792). Swedish ruler, patron and librettist. Son of Queen Lovisa Ulrika (the sister of Frederick the Great) and King Adolph Frederik, he began to write librettos and dramas at the age of ten. He continued his education in Paris, where he began to write paraphrases of opéras comiques by Favart and tragédies lyriques by Racine, Marmontel, Quinault and others. In 1771 he became King of Sweden, and in March 1772 staged a coup which gave him absolute authority and allowed him to pursue his aim of creating a Swedish national opera. In January 1773 F.A.B. Uttini’s Thetis och Pelée, for which Gustavus had drafted the text, inaugurated the Swedish Royal Opera. Over the next decade Gustavus personally oversaw the development of Swedish opera, gathering around him a group of native writers to rework his prose texts into librettos. He established a court theatre, gave financial support to private theatres, and encouraged the composers J.G. Naumann, J.M. Kraus and G.J. Vogler, the ballet-masters Louis Gallodier, Frederico Terrade and Antoine Bournonville and the set designer Louis-Jean Desprez. He built the Royal Opera (...

(fl 1776–91). Austrian amateur musician and patron. A diplomat in Berlin during the 1770s and in Naples during the 1780s, he pursued a variety of musical activities. He played and composed for the keyboard (including two published sonatas); he improved a hurdy-gurdy, which he called the lira organizzata, taught Ferdinando IV of Naples how to play it, and commissioned several German and Austrian composers, including Haydn, to write music for it. As self-appointed agent for the instrument builder Johann Andreas Stein, he arranged for the purchase and shipping of pianos from Stein’s workshop in Augsburg to Naples. Hadrava’s letters to his friend Johann Paul Schulthesius ( A-Wn ) represent an important source of information about Neapolitan musical life during the 1780s.

Member of Lichnowsky family

(b Vienna, May 10, 1769; d after 1829). Austrian patron of music, sister of Karl von Lichnowsky. She also befriended Beethoven in Vienna and received the dedication of his rondo op.51 no.2 in 1802. After her marriage to the Marquis of Carneville she moved to Paris, where she was associated with musicians, including Chopin....

Member of Lichnowsky family

(b Vienna, 1756/1758/1761; d Vienna, March 15, 1814). Austrian patron of music. He lived mostly in Vienna but also maintained an estate at Hradec nad Moravicí, near Troppau (now Opava, Czech Republic). From 1776 to 1782 he studied law in Leipzig and Göttingen. In Göttingen he also had contact with Forkel and started to collect works by J.S. Bach. In 1788 he married Maria Christiane (1765–1841), daughter of Countess Maria Wilhelmine of Thun-Hoherstein. Prince Karl was a pupil and patron of Mozart; they belonged to the same masonic lodge. A year after his marriage he invited Mozart to accompany him on a trip to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin. The trip did not bring Mozart the hoped-for improvement in his financial situation, on top of which he apparently had to lend the Prince 100 gulden (letter, 23 May 1789...

[Pietro Leopoldo]

(b Vienna, May 5, 1747; d Vienna, March 1, 1792). Holy Roman Emperor, patron of music, third son of Empress Maria Theresa Habsburg and Francis of Lorraine. As a patron Leopold influenced operatic life in both Tuscany, which he ruled as Grand Duke from 1765 to 1790, and Vienna. In Tuscany he hired as virtuosi di camera several leading opera singers, among them Giovanni Manzuoli, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and Tommaso Guarducci, and subsidized the performance of several innovatory operas by Traetta, including his masterpiece, Ifigenia in Tauride (1763, Vienna; revived in Florence in 1768). In 1790 Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph II in Vienna and brought with him a taste for Italian opera as it was cultivated in Florence. He undertook a major transformation of the Viennese court opera in 1791, dismissing some of those who had contributed much to Viennese opera during the previous decade (including Lorenzo da Ponte) and hiring singers with whom he had become familiar in Florence. His policies for comic opera are reflected in Cimarosa’s ...

[Josef Frantisek Maximilián]

Member of Lobkowitz family

(b Roudnice nad Labem, Dec 7, 1772; d Třeboň, Dec 15, 1816). Bohemian patron and bass singer, son of Ferdinand Philipp Joseph Lobkowitz. He was the first Duke of Roudnice and the foremost patron of the arts in Vienna and Bohemia from his coming of age in 1797 until 1814. The Lobkowitz accounts record vast sums paid for art, books, musical instruments, and music scores. He also granted several artists annual pensions, the most famous of these being Beethoven. Beginning in 1796 or 1797 he hired a small orchestra which accompanied him on his travels and he had several operas performed every year at his seats in Vienna, Roudnice and Eisenberg (now Jezeři). He hired several copyists’ workshops to make hundreds of copies of the works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and other composers and substantially enlarged the family music archives. In 1799 he converted the largest hall in his Vienna palace into a concert hall with a stage for 24 orchestra players and upholstered benches for the audience. His support of opera and theatre was prodigious: in ...

(b Brunswick, c1755; d Paris, 1811). German musical dilettante. He was chamberlain to the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, from 1788 was in the service of the Prince of Prussia, and from 1799 served as a diplomat in Munich and Paris. He composed symphonies, chamber music and keyboard sonatas in a galant style similar to that of J.C. Bach, and his Dix ariettes allemandes contain folk material and show a talent for melodies. Gerber considered Münchhausen a good keyboard and glass harmonica player and a creditable composer, although elsewhere his works were criticized for their antiquated forms and ornamentation.

Member of Novello family

(b London, Sept 6, 1781; d Nice, Aug 9, 1861). English organist, choirmaster, conductor, teacher, editor, publisher, composer, collector, and antiquarian. Born at 240 Oxford Street he was the second surviving son of a Piedmontese pastry cook, Giuseppe Novello (1744–1808), who settled in London in 1771 and married the Norfolk-born Joan Wins a year later. Vincent and his brother Francis (1779–1843) studied in Huitmille near Boulogne in the early 1790s. From about 1793 Vincent was a choirboy at London’s Sardinian Embassy chapel under Samuel Webbe’s direction and took organ lessons from him. In c 1797, on Webbe’s recommendation he was appointed organist to the Portuguese Embassy chapel in South Street, Grosvenor Square, where his brother Francis was already principal bass. He held this office until 1824 and made the chapel famous and fashionable partly through regular performances of Haydn’s and Mozart’s masses, with which he had become acquainted through the friendship and fine musical library of the Rev. C.I. Latrobe. These works had not previously been heard in England, and non-Catholics and Catholics alike flocked to hear them; a writer of the 1830s even ranked ‘the introduction of the German masses to the Roman Catholic chapels’ with the foundation of the Philharmonic Society as a major influence in what he called ‘the improvement of our national taste’. Novello was a member of the Philharmonic Society from its foundation in ...

[Poisson, Jeanne Antoinette ]

(b Paris, Dec 29, 1721; d Versailles, April 16, 1764). French patron . She married Guillaume Lenormand, Seigneur d’Etioles, in 1741 and established a popular salon frequented by such leading literary figures as Pompeo magno Voltaire, C.-L. de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu and Fontenelle. In 1745 she became Louis XV’s mistress and was granted the title ‘Marquise de Pompadour’. In this capacity she was able to encourage many more artists, including the composers François Rebel, Mion and La Garde and the librettists Pierre Laujon, Moncrif and P.-C. Nivelle de La Chaussée. In 1747 she formed her own amateur théâtre at Versailles, the Theatre des Petits Cabinets, which moved to Bellevue; in 1752. During the next seven years some 33 operatic works, mainly in the pastoral genre, were performed, with Mme de Pompadour often taking the leading role. The Duke of Luynes judged her voice small but pleasant. She was, moreover, an excellent musician and an attractive, competent actress....