BOOKS

Have Violin, Will Travel: The Louis Persinger Story Raymond Bruzan

212PP ISBN 9780999314661

SANGAMON VALLEY WRITING ASSOCIATES $24

The title of this slim book is something of a misnomer. The life of the American violinist, pianist and teacher Louis Persinger (1887–1966) is in here, but the author admits to enjoying ‘the local history of his community’ and there is so much detail about the various twigs, shoots and branches of the Persinger family tree that poor Louis often gets swamped.

In the fashionable American style, we also get rather too much information about Raymond Bruzan himself, his researches and how they were hindered by the Covid pandemic. ‘It’s hard to describe the feelings I had during my recent visit to Vienna, Austria,’ he writes, ‘while sitting on the Ehrbar Saal ConcertHall stage where Louis Persinger had performed in 1911.’ Quite.

Like Albert Spalding, Persinger had his roots deep in the soil of North America. His name derived from Jacob Pertschinger, a German farmer who settled in Virginia in 1735. His mother, who was musical, was a Humphreys, from a family that was already in Virginia by the late 1600s.

Louis was born in Rochester, Illinois. His father worked on the railways and the family moved a number of times. In Colorado Springs the musical lad acquired a rich sponsor who paid for studies at Leipzig Conservatory. This man died but a wealthy female backer was found for Louis to learn with Ysaÿe for two years in Brussels. He was thus equipped with the best of the German and Franco-Belgian schools.

He developed a reasonable career but in 1913 opted for the life of an orchestral concertmaster in Berlin, Brussels and finally San Francisco, also touring with that city’s Chamber Music Society and his quartet –Bruzan tells us nothing about these ensembles – but teaching more and more, especially at Juilliard from 1930. Pupils included Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci, Isaac Stern (briefly), Camilla Wicks and Guila Bustabo. We are given brief portraits of some of them. The UK’s very own Diana Cummings was with him for a year.

Louis Persinger teaching a young Yehudi Menuhin

No records were made of Persinger the violinist in his prime. It is ironic that we can easily hear him playing the piano on record, accompanying his pupils, but his few violin recordings from the 1950s – mostly with his violist son Rolf – are no longer easily available. They show a tidy, style-conscious fiddler but not a particularly individual personality. The book is well illustrated, although most of the pictures are very small.

TULLY POTTER

Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c.1700:

Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont Don Fader

343PP ISBN 9781783276288

THE BOYDELL PRESS

The new light that Don Fader sheds on the multifaceted career and works of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (bap.1667–1737) will doubtless be of principal interest to readers of The Strad; but Fader’s overall focus is on the international collaboration and exchange of musicians, dancers, scores, musical styles and choreographic techniques in which Montéclair became closely involved.

The Frenchman’s writings and theoretical works, among them his Méthode façile pour apprendre à jouer du violon (1711–12), the first French treatise on violin playing, and Principes de musique (1736), an informative source on ornamentation, are key to other pieces of Fader’s investigative jigsaw: the cultural patronage of Montéclair’s employer in Italy, Charles-Henri de Lorraine, Prince de Vaudémont (governor of Milan under the Spanish crown, 1698–1706); musical life in Paris and Milan at the turn of the 18th century; and the contributions offered and problems faced by musicians and dancers who worked across French and Italian national and cultural boundaries. They reveal not only how Montéclair’s direct experience of Italian culture influenced him, but also how it ‘resonated in the broader French musical culture’ of the period.

Fader has assembled information from a rich variety of sources, principal among which are papers belonging to Vaudémont, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and detailed in Appendix 2. Following an introductory guided tour of the volume’s content and discussion of the significance of Franco–Italian exchange at the turn of the 18th century, Fader’s four substantial chapters proceed chronologically, following Montéclair’s journeys, both literal and artistic. Chapters 1 and 4 focus on Paris, charting respectively Montéclair’s early career as a cosmopolitan musician and the profound influence of his Italian experiences, evident in the broadening of his style and the enrichment of his expressive vocabulary. The central chapters concentrate on Italian–French collaborations in Milan, Turin and beyond, fostered by Vaudémont’s attempts to enhance his stature by infusing French elements into northern Italian culture. Activities at his French-modelled court included the staging of music and dance that mixed Italian and French conventions and multiple exchanges of musicians, dancers and scores between Paris, Hanover, Turin, Venice and various Lombardic states. The operatic repertoire in Milan and Turin is reviewed in Chapter 3, including various new musical sources, notably an opera by Albinoni and previously unknown works by Montéclair. The fusion of French and Italian musical and choreographic traditions is also demonstrated in the music of Milanese composer Paolo Magni and in Gregorio Lambranzi’s Tantz-Schul (1716).

Fader acts as a judicious guide throughout his exposition of the roots of 18th-century musical cosmopolitanism, making wellfounded assessments based on a thorough understanding of his sources. Each chapter is divided into convenient subsections, many of which are wound up by concluding thoughts, and an overall conclusion suggests that the difference between Italian and French approaches was as much a question of aesthetics as of style, embracing also issues of identity and taste. An epilogue discusses Vaudémont’s papers from two other periods (1713–14 and 1722) in which he recruited musicians in Paris. Although Fader’s structure results in some repetition, it serves his purpose well and allows him to examine more deeply some aspects only sparsely investigated by others, for example the dance transcriptions from Turinese operas made by Roger Normand.

A page from Montéclair’s Principes de musique explaining the different note values

Substantially accurate, his text is well supported by 17 black and white illustrations, 26 tables, 45 music examples, 2 appendices, a wideranging bibliography and a helpful index. It reveals that Montéclair played a much more significant role in the ‘réunion des goûts’ than has previously been acknowledged and provides a greater understanding of factors which led to ‘the creative hybridisation’ of musical style, operatic conventions and dance technique in France and Italy through the 1720s and beyond.

ROBIN STOWELL