[Book Review] Annette Richards, The Temple of Fame & Friendship: Portraits, music, and history in the C.P.E. Bach Circle. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2022

Barker, Naomi (2024). [Book Review] Annette Richards, The Temple of Fame & Friendship: Portraits, music, and history in the C.P.E. Bach Circle. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2022. Journal of the History of Collections, 36(1) pp. 200–201.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhad026

Abstract

Taking Charles Burney’s description of his visit to Carl Philipp Emanuel (C.P.E.) Bach in Hamburg in 1772 as the starting point, Annette Richards uses the composer’s portrait collection as a vehicle for exploring the cultural milieu of the late eighteenth century. Burney’s account of viewing the portraits, enjoying collegial discussion, and then listening to a private performance by Bach on his favourite clavichord is echoed, perhaps unintentionally, in the structure of the book. The nature of the lived experience of music in an environment full of visual, verbal, affective, authoritative, personal and public information about musicians and musical thinkers is the central issue the book seeks to explore.

The first two chapters take the reader through a description of the collection, the contents of which the author has traced and reconstructed through surviving inventories, and set it against the background of the mania for collecting in the eighteenth century. The subsequent chapters pursue notions rooted in the aesthetic of sensibility (Empfindsamkeit); thus character, feeling, friendship and memorialization become threads that connect the images to their owner and to one another.

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