Sébastien de Brossard’sDictionnaireof 1701: a comparative analysis of the complete copy

Abstract

This article presents a comparative study of what is believed to be the only existing complete copy of the first edition of Sébastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de musique. Dated 1701 and titled Dictionnaire des termes, it is located in the Academic Music Library, Foreign Literature Department of the St Petersburg State Conservatory, Russia. This dictionary is a part of a unique and extensive collection of 15th- to 19th-century editions compiled by Gottfried Engelbert Anders (1795–1866), who worked in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for about 30 years. The collection was purchased by Mikhail Azanchevskii, a Russian patron of the arts, during his visit to Paris in 1868. In 1870, Azanchevskii donated the collection in its entirety to the Russian Music Society. Later it became a part of the St Petersburg State Conservatory library. One of the main outcomes of this study of the dictionary is that it is possible to prove the textual similarity with its ‘second’ edition (1705, pp.xij[4]–380) and to see that its text generally corresponds with that of the 1703 edition. This article also presents reliable evidence that some of the crucial treatises mentioned in the dictionary had been published before 1701, since in that year de Brossard mentions de Saint Lambert’s name in a list of French authors whose works he has personally ‘seen, read, and examined’, proving that one (or possibly both) of de Saint Lambert’s works had been published before then. This suggests that scholars should pay extra attention to the word ‘nouveau’ in the title of his Nouveau traité de l’accompagnement published in Paris in 1707. Finally, we suggest three questions for future research: Why has de Brossard’s dictionary of 1701 disappeared? Why is it not mentioned in Christophe Ballard’s catalogues of printed works? Why did de Brossard himself not list it in his own catalogue?

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