Search Results

[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 ...

[Fane, John; later 11th Earl of Westmorland]

(b London, Feb 3, 1784; d Wansford, Northants., Oct 16, 1859). English amateur musician. He was the eldest son of the 10th Earl of Westmorland, a Tory politician, and was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge (MA 1808), where he studied music under Charles Hague. His career was political, military and diplomatic. He was MP for Lyme Regis (1806–16). From 1803 to 1815 he served in various campaigns in the Napoleonic wars, at one time as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington (his wife’s uncle). He became a privy councillor in 1822, a major-general in 1825, lieutenant-general in 1838 and full general in 1854. He was British envoy at Florence from 1814 to 1830, resident minister at Berlin from 1841 to 1851 (acting as mediator between Prussia and Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein dispute), and ambassador to the imperial court at Vienna from 1851 to 1855...

[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 ...

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 ...