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The Temple of Fame & Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle by Annette Richards (review)

2023; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/fam.2023.a901184

2471-156X

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: The Temple of Fame & Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle by Annette Richards Stephen Roe, Sandi-Jo Malmon, and Colin Coleman The Temple of Fame & Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle. By Annette Richards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. [167336 p. ISBN 978-0-226-80626-6, $55 (cloth); 978-0-226-81677-7, $54.99 (e-book)] Art collections of composers and musicians have been an overlooked corner of music history. Pictorial art was garnered by many eighteenth-century music historians and composers. If you go to Bologna, you can see the impressive portrait collection of Padre Martini, a result of his persistent badgering of his pupils and contemporaries. It formed an important adjunct to his musical research and was displayed in his library of manuscripts and historic editions of music. In London, Johann Christian Bach was passionately interested in art, collecting paintings and engravings by his friends Thomas Gainsborough, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, and Francesco Bartolozzi, which, according to Henry Angelo, were often pinned loosely on his walls (Reminiscences of Henry Angelo … [London: H. Colburn, 1828], 190). At the Hanover Square Rooms, one of the first purpose-built public concert halls, J. C. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel displayed paintings by Gainsborough and his contemporaries. Some believe that the surviving portraits of Bach, Abel, Joseph Merlin, and Johann Christian Fischer, among others, were conceived by Gainsborough to be exhibited in the Rooms. Abel also had a great collection of paintings, listed in an auction catalogue in 1787, including the magnificent portrait by Gainsborough depicting the gambist with his fine instrument and Pomeranian dog, now in the Huntington Museum, Pasadena. In 2012, Annette Richards published her ground-breaking catalogue of the portrait collection assembled by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, which, after the eighteenth century, was seldom regarded as being of much importance. She pieced it together from the extensive listing of about four hundred items in Bach's Nachlass-Verzeichniss. This comprised mostly prints and silhouettes, with some oil paintings, pastels, and drawings. Richards not only found copies of the prints, but, in the process, also discovered that a large part of the original collection was extant in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. She assembled the images and descriptions in the catalogue, bringing to light much new and interesting biographical information about the composer and his contemporaries. C. P. E. Bach, who played such a role in preserving his father's estate and the Alt-Bachisches Archiv, also conserved some of the early portraits. Johann Sebastian had a few important paintings: the anonymous picture of his father Johann Ambrosius Bach, exhibited until recently in Leipzig, but now returned to Berlin; a now-lost image of his second wife Anna Magdalena Bach; and the celebrated Elias Gottlob Haussmann portrait of himself, clutching a slip of music (1748), once owned by William Scheide, now in the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, where Richards curated an exhibition of the C. P. E. Bach collection in 2007. When writing the catalogue, Richards believed that Emanuel built on his father's existing collection. But in her present work, she has reversed this view. Apart from the family portraits, she believes that Emanuel's collection was primarily his own and that even the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prints were not part of his family's heritage. The portraits had immense importance for Emanuel. Many of them, including the Haussmann painting, held pride of place in his music room. Here Bach received visitors, such as Charles Burney, who gives a vivid account of Emanuel performing on his Silbermann clavichord, surrounded by the art. The walls were crammed with pictures, the collection of prints [End Page 177] kept in folders, which the composer enjoyed leafing through with his guests. The 2012 catalogue is a fine piece of scholarship, but it was not necessarily the final word. There are so many interconnections, links, and leads between the art, the artists, and the musicians, that it was beyond the scope of the catalogue to illuminate these diverse threads. Richards indicated that she would be returning to the subject and ten years later, this book is the result. She...