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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The purpose of the present article is to record a decisive period in Charles Tessier's career as a professional lutenist: his residence in England which led to the publication of his first collection of court airs. Tessier's journey to England is no novelty, but whereas information so far was limited to the London publication of his court airs, three unedited letters he addressed to Anthony Bacon now make it possible to project his visit and his publication against their social background. The paper accordingly is a contribution to the as yet unknown biography of Charles Tessier.
Anthony Bacon appears to hold the key to explaining Tessier's visit to England. Their acquaintance may go back to some time between 1579 and 1592 when Bacon was residing in France, studying continental politics and gathering intelligence with a view to putting his experience at the disposal of the English government.
1 The letters are part of the Anthony Bacon Papers which have been kept at Lambeth Palace, London, ever since Archbishop Tenison bequeathed them to the Library.
2 The few biographical scraps vailable have been gleaned by François Lesure for his entry on Tessier in Friedrich Blume's Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik (Kassel, 1966), Vol. 13, henceforward referred to as MGG. Lesure drew on older musical dictionaries, such as Fétis, François-Joseph, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (Paris, 1835-44)Google Scholar, which claimed that Tessier was born at Pézenas. Robert Eitner, in his turn, reproduced the note given by Fétis in the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten (Leipzig, 1903), Vol. 9, adding some bibliographical data of his own. Eitner's entry was enlarged by P.H. for Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom, 5th ed., Vol. 8 (1954), henceforward quoted as GDMM.
In view of the scarcity of source material, it is comprehensible that some errors about Tessier's life and works should have been committed in secondary literature. Thus he is said to have been lutenist to the English king in 1597 ( Michel, François et al., Encyclopédie de la musique, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar; Honegger, Marc, Dictionnaire de la musique, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1970).Google Scholar In 1597, however, England was ruled by a queen, and Tessier never entered her royal service.
It has been commonly held that Tessier wrote the music of Sir Philip Sidney's eighth song from Astrophel and Stella, ‘In a grove most rich of shade,’ which was published in Robert Dowland's A Musicall Banquet in 1610. See Squire, I. W. B., ‘Robert Dowland's Musical Banquet, 1610.’ Musical Antiquary 1 (1909/10), 44–56 Google Scholar; Bontoux, Germaine, La chanson en Angleterre au temps d'Elisabeth (Oxford, 1936), pp. 210–214 Google Scholar; GDMM; MGG. However, Edward Doughtie in Lyrics from English Airs 1596-1622 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Diana Poulton in her thorough study of John Dowland (London, 1972) have made it clear that the music was composed by Guillaume Tessier and originally printed in his Primo libro dell'Arie (Paris, 1582) as a setting for Ronsard's ‘Le petit enfant amour.’ Robert Dowland must have found that Guillaume Tessier's tune fitted Sidney's poem and thus arranged a lute accompaniment. Conversely, Charles Tessier's court airs (London, 1597) have been fathered on Guillaume Tessier by Falls, Cyril, Mountjoy: Elizabethan General (London, 1956), p. 225 Google Scholar; and by Diana Poulton (p. 402).
3 Ernst Zulauf, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Landgräflich-Hessischen Hofkapelle zu Cassel bis auf die Zeit Moritz des Gelehrten, PH.D. thesis, University of Leipzig (Kassel, 1902), p. 94.
4 Birch, Thomas, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the Year 1581 till her Death (London, 1754), 1, 72–73.Google Scholar
5 Bacon received a presentation copy, a fragment of which is filed among his papers at Lambeth (MS. 661, no. 15). This fragment contains the title page, the Italian dedication, and two dedicatory poems which we have edited in the Appendices. Bacon's endorsement leaves no doubt about the date of printing. He first wrote 1596, but then crossed out the year to replace it by 1597. Apparently the first entry was made in O.S., but realizing that the author and printer had adopted the Gregorian Calendar in what was obviously a publication destined for the continental market, Bacon changed O.S. to N.S. The endorsement reads as follows: ‘Mr. Tessier son livre à Madame Riche, l'an 1596 [1596 cancelled] fébvrier 1597.’ Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R., the editors of the Short-Title Catalogue of English Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1475 until 1640 (London, 1926)Google Scholar, were mistaken in ascribing the date to 1598.
6 The full title of the Lambeth fragment reads: Contratenor / Le Premier Livre / de Chansons & Airs de / court, tant Enfrançois [sic] qu'en / Italien & en Gascon à / 4. & 5. parties: / mis en Musique par le sieur / Carles Tessier, Musitien / de la Chambre du / Roy. / [Device] / Imprimés à Londres par Thomas Este, / Imprimeur ordinaire. / 1597. / Les présents Liures se treuuent ches Edouard Blount Libraire / demeurant au cimitière de Sainct Paul deuant la gran / porte du North dudit S. Paul à Londres.
Thus Tessier presented Bacon with the counter-tenor part-book, omitting the cantus, the tenor, the alto, and the bass part-books. Are we therefore entitled to conclude that Anthony Bacon had a high-pitched voice made for the counter-tenor part? The copy extant in the Huntington Library contains the superius and the bass; the copy extant in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, the superius, the counter-tenor, the bass, and the tenor.
7 Bruce Pattison, in his Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London, 1948), p. 63, and John Buxton, in Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London, 1954), p. 114, believed that the musical setting of Sir Philip Sidney's eighth song from Astrophel and Stella was composed by Charles Tessier (see n. 2) and therefore argued that Tessier had some connection with the Sidney circle. Sidney, however, was dead by the time Tessier was in England. Their argument, though outdated by the findings of Edward Doughtie (see n. 2), can still be upheld insofar as Essex considered himself to be Sidney's political and literary heir, marrying his widow Frances Walsingham. Moreover, his sister, immortalized by Sidney as Stella, was Tessier's dedicatee.
8 Birch, , Memoirs, 1, 49.Google Scholar Daneau published over fifty works. See Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, Vol. 10 (1966). According to the DNB, Daneau dedicated to Bacon his commentary on the minor prophets (Geneva, 1586).
9 ‘Now once againe,’ Yong addressed Lady Rich, ‘in this translation out of Spanish (which language also with the present matter being so well knowen to your Ladiship) whose reprehension and severe sentence of all others may I more justly feare, then that which (Honorable Madame) at election you may herein duely give, or with favour take away’ (quoted from George of Montemayor's Diana and Gil Polo's Enamoured Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy [Oxford, 1968], p. 4). For other books dedicated to Lady Rich see Williams, Franklin B., Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641 (London, 1962).Google Scholar There is no information on Tessier and Lady Rich in Maud S. Rawson's engaging, though slightly romanced, study of Penelope Rich and Her Circle (London, 1911). Among the numerous studies devoted to Sidney's Stella, it may suffice to point out Cyril Fall's ‘Penelope Rich and the Poets: Sidney, Philip and Ford, John’ in Essays by Divers Hands, ed. Thirkell, Angela, Vol. 28 (1956), 123–137.Google Scholar
10 Pp. 100, 101, 156. For Essex see infra.
11 The three poems Petit addressed to Pérez have been edited and commented in the first volume of my study of A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: Correspondence of Antonio Pe'rez's Exile (London: Tamesis Books Ltd, 1975), nos. 124, 125. For Petit's visit to Burley-on-the-Hill see my paper on ‘An Unrecorded Performance of Titus Andronicus,’ Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961), 102-109.
12 Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (Princeton, 1953), ch. 3.
13 Ibid., p. 62.
14 Ungerer, ‘The Printing of Spanish Books in Elizabethan England,’ The Library, Fifth Series, 20 (1965), 195-197; A Spaniard in Elizabethan England, Vol. 2, ch. ix, due to be published in 1976.
15 Ungerer, , A Spaniard in Elizabethan England, 1 (1975), no. 203.Google Scholar
16 See Poulton's biography of John Dowland, passim.
17 The Earl's popularity with native musicians has induced Lillian M. Ruff and D. Arnold Wilson to advance the theory that the production of madrigals and lute songs reflects the ups and downs of the Earl's career. Thus the peak of madrigal production is said to coincide with the zenith of the Earl's public career in 1598, and the peak of the lute production with his fall and disgrace in 1600. Ruff, and Wilson, , ‘The Lute Song and Elizabethan Politics,’ Past and Present 44 (1969), 3–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Nigel Fortune is of the opinion that Dowland knew Tessier. See his essay in Gerald Abraham's The Age of Humanism 1540-1630. New Oxford History of Music, IV (1968), 206. He even suggests that Dowland helped Tessier to find a printer. But, as we now know, there were persons among the Essex partisans qualified to suggest a printer.
A striking similarity between the careers of the two lutenists is worth being looked into: their relations with Maurice Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. Did Dowland bring the Landgrave and Tessier together? Did he who told ‘the courteous Reader,’ in his First Booke of Songs (1597), that he could ‘never speak sufficientlie’ of the Landgrave's ‘princely vertues and favors towards’ him recommend his French colleague to the German prince? Dowland returned to England from the Court of the Landgrave in the first weeks of 1597. when Tessier was entertaining the Essex partisans with his lute songs, and after his return he remained in touch with the Landgrave (see Poulton, , John Dowland, pp. 47–50 Google Scholar).
page 199 note 1 Essex House, Westminster.
page 202 note 1 This seems to mean: Les nuages soucieux d'une bonne traversée de la Manche favorisent Pérez.
page 202 note 2 Present subjunctive of vadere; read: aille t'accompagnant.
page 202 note 3 Masculine for metrical reasons?
page 202 note 4 Meaning: le bâteau.
page 202 note 5 The following paraphrase may not be far from the meaning intended: Mon coeur souhaite encore que Dieu, l'astre de l'univers, agisse et tienne tout tranquille.
page 202 note 6 Henry IV.
