TECLA - Carcassi
Matteo Carcassi was an Italian guitarist born on 8 April 1796 in Florence, Italy, the son of instrument-makers. This present page about him is new as of August 2024, to take account of recent new discoveries about Carcassi and his life. The previous page which was here paid tribute to the very good research carried out by Mauro Mariottini and Mario Dell’Ara and published by them in the journal Il Fronimo in October 1999, and by Raffaele Carpino and Mario Dell’Ara in Il Fronimo in October 2018.
Carcassi’s obituary in the Journal des Débats of 20 January 1853 wrote that “[il] avait fait de la France, qu’il avait servie comme soldat, sa patrie adoptive et de prédilection” (‘He had made of France, which he had served as a soldier, his adopted and favourite country’), and it occurred to me a long time ago that if that was true then there should surely be a dossier for him, or at least a mention in a register, at the records of the French army which are kept at the Château de Vincennes near Paris and where I had been fortunate enough to find some details about Sor’s brother Carlos who did indeed serve in the French army. So in 2021 I finally did something about it and I wrote to Vincent Dubès who teaches at the Conservatoire Royal in Mons in Belgium which is not so very far from Paris, to wonder whether he might like to take a trip to Vincennes to have a look at the registers. Vincent didn’t go, but he did make the suggestion to Catherine Marlat who is the joint author of a fine book about the guitar maker René Lacote, and she did go to Vincennes and she did indeed find the entry for Carcassi in the military registers there, and reported on it, and on more details that she had found out about Carcassi, in Il Fronimo for January 2023.
That military register at Vincennes says that Carcassi enlisted in the French army in Florence (Italy) on 5 April 1811, that is to say just three days before his fifteenth birthday, and the register says that his profession was that of “musicien”. The register also says that Carcassi left the French army on 1 March 1815, that is to say after Napoleon had been forced into exile to Elba in May 1814 and indeed on the very same day, 1 March 1815, that Napoleon landed again in France after having escaped from Elba.
Then as a further recent development, Romolo Calandruccio published in Il Fronimo of April-July 2023 a further article on Carcassi with more details.
Calandruccio writes that Carcassi took part in London on 31 May 1827 in a concert at the house of “Dr Granville” in Grafton Street, and that will certainly be Augustus Bozzi Granville, doctor of medicine, whom we have already encountered in a different context in my book Fernando Sor Composer and Guitarist in its third edition of 2020, in which we saw that this Augustus Bozzi as a young man in 1805 recently qualified in medicine found himself in the part of Italy which had recently been conquered by Napoleon and made into a département of France, which meant that he, Bozzi, was in danger of being drafted into the armies of Napoleon. So in order to avoid that he took a ship to the Levant and then another ship from Smyrna to Málaga in Spain, where it so happened that Fernando Sor was living, and he took music lessons from Sor. He gave some advice to Sor, that he should attend to his career as an administrator and not waste so much time on music. Bozzi later found his way to London where he took the name of an ancestor of his named Granville and set up a medical practice in Harley Street which evidently did very well to enable him to live in a large house in the good area of Grafton Street. He was apparently the first person to carry out an autopsy on an Egyptian mummy. He wrote in his autobiography, by the way, that his ability to sing “Yo que soy contrabandista” to the guitar was not a help but a positive hindrance in his medical practice.
So when Granville and Carcassi met in London on 31 May 1827, did they talk about Bozzi’s meeting with Sor in Málaga in 1805? I wonder!
Carcassi evidently settled in Paris very soon after he left the French army in 1815, because his name, as resident in Paris, figures in a list of subscribers to Molino’s Nouvelle Méthode pour la Guitare in its French edition which was published in Paris in 1817 (confirmation of this 1817 date was kindly sent to me by Jan Burgers the author of a recent book on Molino). In 1820 Gardeton’s Annales of that year listed him as resident at 8 rue Grange-Batelière, which is still there, now rue de la Grange Batelière, just a few minutes’ walk from the centre, off the present rue du Faubourg Montmartre. One wonders whether, if he had fought for France, he was in receipt of a military pension.
At the same time he began publishing. The earliest known date for this is 1820, in which year again in Gardeton’s Annales there is a mention of Six Walses by him, which is likely to be his op. 4. He published several (perhaps all) of his earliest works himself, including op. 4 of which a copy of an edition published by him is in the British Library. By 1822 he was publishing with Meissonnier, for a Meissonnier edition of his Trois rondo op. 2 can be dated 1822 or shortly before by the publisher’s address (for the dating of Meissonnier editions, see my book TECLA X 10264: Fernando Sor, Composer and Guitarist, second edition, pages 64-66).
Altogether he published at least 77 opus numbers. His Méthode complète pour la Guitare, op. 59, first published in Paris in 1836, became very famous, and his Etudes op. 60 are played by every guitarist. He also wrote guitar accompaniments to many French songs of the period.
He died in Paris on 16 January 1853.
At its best the music of Carcassi shows a good gift for melody and is well constructed. My own favourites are his TECLA 0342: Six Caprices for guitar, op. 26 and TECLA 0345: 25 Etudes for Guitar, op. 60 (both available in Tecla).
His obituary in Le Ménestrel of 23 January 1853 wrote about him as follows : “il avait le caractère le plus aimable, des moeurs exemplaires, une droiture de cœur et un jugement remarquables. Il laissera des regrets à tous ceux qui l’ont connu, car on ne pouvait le connaître sans l’aimer.” (‘He had a most amiable character, exemplary behaviour, and remarkable steadfast heart and judgement. He will be mourned by all those who knew him, for it was not possible to know him without liking him.’)
-Brian Jeffery
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