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PHILIPPE DE MONTE: NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2006

Richard Wistreich
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Abstract

In a letter written in the year he died, the novelist Italo Calvino spoke of his unease with the writing of the story of his own life: ‘Each time I see my life fixed and objectified I am seized with anxiety, especially when it is notes that I myself have supplied … by repeating the same things [but] using different words I always hope to get round my neurotic relationship with autobiography.’ Such testimony from a still-living creative artist is a valuable reminder of the historiographical conundrums of even the most apparently ‘authentic’ biographical narrative. Those of us who read, research and write the stories of long-dead artists, relying as we must on the contents of documents both written and preserved for all kinds of forgotten and quite likely unfathomable reasons, have learnt to be cautious, if not a little anxious, in our relationships with what they seem to be saying to us. The more consciously autobiographical such writings appear to be, the more circumspectly we tend to tread, trying to temper the seductive pleasure of a time-dissolving intimacy with our subjects which such texts seem to promise with our historians' sense of their Siren dangers. Nevertheless, in the case of the still largely unknown story of Philippe de Monte, whose scarce documentary sources, apart from a rich but small handful of private letters, consist of the often enigmatic prefaces to his published music, the addition of two new, very substantial and intensely autobiographical documents can hardly fail to excite expectations of increased access to ‘the man himself’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Research for this article and the accompanying transcriptions was made possible through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Fund of the University of Newcastle. I would like to thank the following for their help in various ways: Jan Batá, Bonnie Blackburn, Kathryn Bosi, Iain Fenlon, Thorsten Hindrichs, Rachel Laurence, Robert Lindell, Thomas Rütten, Elisa Smith Dickey and Candace Smith. Translations from Latin are by Leofranc Holford- Strevens; Dario Tessicini read my transcriptions of the original documents and made many valuable suggestions, although I retain responsibility for the readings published here.