The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe. By Samantha Owens. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2017. [xviii, 385 pp. ISBN 978-1-78327-234-1.]

Reviewed by Arne Spohr*

1. Introduction

2. Cousser’s “Commonplace Book”

3. Reconstructing Cousser’s Biography

4. Musical Exchange and the “Mixed Taste” in Germany

5. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

1.1 John Sigismond Cousser (1660–1727), born with the German name of Johann Sigismund Kusser in the Royal Free City of Pressburg, Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia), was a musician of many trades and talents.^[1] As the son of Johann Kusser, the music director of Pressburg’s Lutheran churches, he grew up in the German-speaking community of this multiethnic city before his family fled Hungary because of religious persecution in 1674. The Kussers eventually settled in Stuttgart, where Johann Kusser became music director of the Stiftskirche and teacher at the Pädagogium, a local Latin school. For his son, however, Stuttgart was just the first station of what was to become a remarkably peripatetic career, the subject of Samantha Owens’s admirably researched and written monograph.

1.2. Even by our own modern standards, the degree of Cousser’s professional mobility seems extraordinary. As Johann Gottfried Walther, one of Cousser’s first biographers, observed in 1732, “he traveled all over Germany, and there would hardly have been a place where he was not known” (179). During the course of his career, Cousser served as Kapellmeister at the courts of Stuttgart and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as well as director at the Goosemarket Opera in Hamburg. Moreover, he spent substantial amounts of time in Paris and northern Italy, where he gained first-hand experience with the composition and performance of French and Italian music. As Walther notes, Cousser eventually relocated to London, “because Germany seemed too limiting to him” (179). In the English capital he supported himself as a private music teacher and concert organizer, before he finally moved to Ireland in 1707. There he became music director of the vice-regal court in Dublin, a position he kept until his death.

1.3 Traditionally, Cousser has been viewed as one of the earliest German musicians to facilitate the transfer of French music (particularly Jean-Baptiste Lully’s) to Germany during the late seventeenth century, and as a precursor and inspirer of later German composers of the high Baroque, notably Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Christoph Graupner.^[2] Yet his contemporaries, particularly Walther and Johann Mattheson, clearly valued Cousser for his own creative merits, and considered him one of the most innovative musical figures of his generation, not only as an important agent of musical exchange, but also as a pioneering music director. Owens’s monograph on Cousser, the first to appear since Hans Scholz’s study Johann Sigismund Kusser (Cousser): Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1911), therefore seems long overdue.

2. Cousser’s “Commonplace Book”

2.1 Even though her study’s focus on Cousser’s biography suggests, at least at first sight, a traditional “life and works” approach, Owens declares that “this book … is unashamedly not a ‘life and works’ study” (7). As a closer look reveals, Owens places the specifics of Cousser’s biography in the broader contexts of “performance, composition and dissemination of music” (7), and explores his professional work in musical institutions such as the Braunschweig Court Opera and the rather different environment of musical entrepreneurship that he encountered in London.

2.2 The primary source that forms a thematic focus in Owens’s study, Cousser’s so-called Commonplace Book, provides ample material for such a “grass roots” approach that mixes elements of microhistory and institutional history. This source is a substantial, hitherto little-studied manuscript that sheds light on many aspects of Cousser’s personal and professional life. As Owens rightly notes, the label of “commonplace book” does not match the highly “diverse and disordered” contents of this fascinating 450-page document, which should perhaps be more aptly called a notebook or scrapbook. (A digital copy can be accessed from the website of the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.^[3]) Cousser’s notes contain a wealth of specifically music-related information, such as a list of librettos and musical works, notes on the ranges and tuning of various instruments, a list of thirty-three directions labeled “What a virtuoso has to observe, upon coming to London” (201), and an address book containing over 500 surnames of Cousser’s friends and acquaintances in Ireland, England, and the Continent, many of whom were fellow musicians. It also comprises notes on matters of (and challenges to) everyday life, such as traveling times and costs, remedies (e.g., for toothache and warts), recipes for “an infallible love powder” and “a love-enchanted ring” (186) as well as for “Bratwurst” and “Leberwurst” (liverwurst) (189). In short, there’s hardly a topic that is missing in Cousser’s notebook, “bringing to life for present-day readers aspects of the day-to-day business of being a musician in the early modern era” (7). Cousser’s Commonplace Book therefore represents an important source not only for musicologists, but also for cultural historians of early modern Europe.

2.3 Since an annotated edition of the complete document would have pushed the thematic and spatial boundaries of her book, Owens edited only some sections from Cousser’s music-related notes, and included them in her study’s five appendices (pp. 183–328): his address book (Appendix 2), his lists of his books of cantatas, madrigals, duets, and serenatas (Appendix 3), his inventory of overture incipits (Appendix 4), and his notes for his trip to London and the Continent in 1716 (Appendix 5). Appendix 1 provides a summary of the individual contents of the Commonplace Book, providing researchers with a useful tool for further study of this manuscript. Owens’s detailed notes to Appendices 2–4, identifying people’s identities as well as concordances of musical works, are results of her impressive musicological detective work, and make the appendices useful points of reference for anyone researching various aspects of European music in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

3. Reconstructing Cousser’s Biography

3.1 In her study of Cousser’s biography (pp. 1–182), Owens follows a chronological approach, structured by the key stations of his professional career. Chapter 1 discusses his family background in Pressburg, as well as an alleged six-year sojourn to France (1674–80), Chapters 2 and 3 investigate his tenure as Kapellmeister at the Wolfenbüttel Court as well as activities as opera composer there and in Braunschweig (1689–94), and Chapter 4 explores his involvement in the Hamburg Goosemarket Opera, and his role as director of an itinerant opera troupe that gave performances in southern Germany (1694–98). Chapter 5 focuses on his operatic activities at the Württemberg Court in Stuttgart (1698–1704), while Chapters 6–8 investigate the years Cousser lived and worked in England (1704–7) and Ireland (1707–27). Chapter 9, finally, examines the “practicalities of musical exchange” (167) so central to Cousser’s professional activities, connecting and synthesizing some of the complex information presented in the preceding chapters.

3.2 Owens presents a detailed and coherent narrative of Cousser’s professional activities in England and Ireland, previously largely considered a “blind spot” in the musician’s biography. For instance, in their 2004 MGG article on Cousser, Bernhard Moosbauer and Heinz Becker note that “reliable information on his years in London and Dublin is lacking” (“gesichert(e) Informationen über seine Jahre in London und Dublin [fehlen]”)^[4] —an assessment that will now need revising in light of Owens’s substantial new findings. In this and many other cases, Owens is able to use material from the Commonplace Book productively to fill several of such “blind spots” in Cousser’s biography. For instance, she presents convincing evidence that Cousser was not only personally acquainted with but also likely in the service of Bishop Wilhelm Egon of Fürstenberg (1629–1704), a German political ally of Louis XIV during the 1680s.

3.3 However, Cousser’s oft-cited stay in France, which has been roughly dated around 1674–80, sadly still remains one of such “black holes” (14). This lack of information is particularly regrettable in view of his importance as one of the first pioneers of French music in Germany. Even though Cousser’s six-year absence from German court records agrees with Johann Gottfried Walther’s statement that “he had spent a period of six years in Paris,” the biographer’s claim that the young composer became “a favorite of the world-renowned Lully” from whom he learned “the French manner of composition” needs to be viewed with some caution. Cousser himself mentioned neither his sojourn to Paris nor his personal acquaintance with Lully in the German and French dedications to his collection of overture-suites in the French style, his Composition de Musique (1682). Instead, he asserts that he was essentially self-taught in Lully’s style of composition. However, as Owens also notes, certain details mentioned in the Commonplace Book suggest that Cousser must have been well acquainted with France and Paris, making the claim that he had indeed studied in Paris more likely. For instance, the fact that the composer owned an engraving of Paris and displayed it in the bedchamber in his Dublin home suggests his close personal acquaintance with the French capital. One wonders if further exploration of French archives could lead to new insights into the mystery of Cousser’s Paris years. Intriguing and also worthy of further investigation is Werner Braun’s speculation that young Cousser could have worked as music copyist for Lully like Johann Fischer (1646–ca. 1716), another musician associated with the Stuttgart court, whose five-year work in the service of the French composer is documented.^[5]

3.4 Owens’s chapter on Cousser’s work at the Wolfenbüttel court and his work for the court opera at Braunschweig makes for some of the most exciting reading in Owens’s book. Her vivid discussion is largely based on source material kept at the State Archive in Wolfenbüttel (Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel). Owens shows in her case studies of Cousser’s operas Ariadne and Andromeda how he successfully navigated the practicalities of operatic production (which included hiring instrumentalists from a variety of courtly and civic institutions, and could be rather costly), but also clashed with the official court librettist, Friedrich Christian Bressand, on more than one occasion. Bressand’s verses, Cousser claimed, did not show any sensitivity towards music. One wonders on this and other occasions if Cousser was a difficult character who liked to argue with superiors, colleagues, and subordinates alike (a French source calls him a “swashbuckler and, of course, quarrelsome” [“breteur et naturellement querelleur”]) (21), or if he was someone who wanted to keep performers to his high standards. Mattheson’s judgment of Cousser rather suggests the second interpretation; he calls him “the incomparable director” (“der unvergleichliche Director”) (66), who “was tireless when it came to instruction” (“war unermüdet im Unterrichten”) (67).

4. Musical Exchange and the “Mixed Taste” in Germany

4.1 Owens’s book reminds us that many musicians in early modern Europe were more mobile than we generally assume today. At a time when one could not travel by airplanes and high-speed rail but had to deal with bad roads, broken carriages, filthy accommodation, and marauding pirates, Cousser and many other musicians in medieval and early modern Europe undeterredly traveled far and wide. They were important agents of musical transfer and exchange between different European music cultures, introducing new repertoires and performance practices to the various stations of their careers. Besides being carried by travelers, music manuscripts and prints were procured by mail, through networks of friends and acquaintances located all over Europe. Through the lens of Cousser’s professional biography and activities, Owens’s book sheds a fascinating light on these manifold “practicalities of musical exchange.”

4.2 Cousser, whose activities and personal networks “stretched the length and breadth of Europe: from Dublin in the west to at least as far as Dresden in the east, and from Kiel in the north to Palermo in the south” (182), indeed makes an excellent case study of musical exchange in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe. He was so intimately acquainted with both French and Italian performance practices and music that he may well be called one of the godfathers of the “mixed taste” of high Baroque German music, a stylistic development for which later composers such as Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Johann Joachim Quantz usually receive credit. In 1683 Cousser was sent from the Württemberg court to the court of Brandenburg-Ansbach to train the musicians there in the French style of playing. During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, Cousser clearly became a model for other German composers writing French-style overture suites, particularly Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657–1714) and Johann Christian Schieferdecker (1679–1732). Yet, equally fluent in performance practice of Italian music, Cousser was also credited by Johann Mattheson with having “first introduced the Italian manner of singing” to the Hamburg Goosemarket Opera in the 1690s (66). As Owens observes, much of Cousser’s surviving music presents, in fact, a “synthesis of French and Italian styles” (53), complicating the designation of a “German Lullyist,”^[6] as Cousser is frequently labeled on the grounds of his published sets of overture-suites.

5. Conclusion

5.1 Owens’s book is beautifully and carefully produced, attesting to the high standards of the publisher, The Boydell Press. Given the wealth of information presented in the nine chapters and five appendices, the detailed index is extremely helpful for quickly locating names, places, musical works, and other items in the text. However, given the highly peripatetic character of Cousser’s career, I wonder if a table chronologically outlining the most important stations of his biography could have been a useful tool to guide the reader through the often rather complex information presented in the book’s nine chapters.

5.2 Compared to Cousser’s biography and aspects of institutional and social history, the discussion of his music takes up relatively little space in Owens’s study. In her preface, Owens thanks several musicians and ensembles who “have … brought Cousser’s music to life” (ix) and mentions the quality of his compositions, yet she also notes the difficulty of “approaching a comprehensive picture of his development as a composer” (7), in light of the regrettably small portion of his musical work that has survived. (On a related note, it would have been helpful if not only Cousser’s extant music, but also his lost works, had been listed in the bibliography. This way, the reader would get a sense for his whole compositional output, and an idea of how much has been lost.) Despite these regrettable losses, however, the surviving body of Cousser’s music certainly allows an analysis of how his compositions reflect his role as an agent of musical exchange. I wonder if such an analysis would have made Owens’s discussion of that topic even stronger. For instance, how do his four collections of overture-suites reflect his intimate knowledge of Lully’s music, and in what way does he adapt the French style to a German context? In what way do the surviving opera arias, published in two collections, mix French and Italian traditions?^[7] And to what degree do the works that he composed in England and Ireland (not only his serenatas, but also his Ode Elegiecal on the Death of Mrs. Arabella Hunt [1706]^[8]) show his knowledge and appreciation of English music? But such questions would perhaps have pushed the boundaries of Owens’s book; they will certainly make a rewarding field of inquiry for future scholars.

5.3 But these are only minor criticisms, given the many merits of the book. Owens’s study of John Sigismond Cousser is a fascinating, thoroughly researched case study of a composer who led a truly European career, and it makes rewarding reading for anyone interested in the history of European music around 1700. Her book provides many new insights on Cousser’s life and the many different institutions he worked in. It also sheds new light on a period of German music history that—due to its situation between the two “giants” Heinrich Schütz and J.S. Bach—has not received the attention that it deserves. It is hoped that Owens’s study will inspire further studies on other early champions of the “mixed taste” in Germany, such as Cousser’s contemporary Johann Christoph Pez (1664–1716), who was another widely traveled musician who composed excellent music.^[9]