This may be apocryphal, but I remember having read that Corbetta taught
young Charles II in France after the Queen Mother fled there with him to
avoid Cromwell and, after the restoration, Charles brought Corbetta to
England. While in France Corbetta had acquired the franchise for an
Italian game of chance similar to roulette which he brought with him to
England. After a while in England, Corbetta's gambling franchise became
so successful that the young nobles of England were gambling away their
fortunes and their elders petitioned the king to send Corbetta back to
France. Charles gave in to their petition, but not before giving
Corbetta a large some of money and a wife to take with him.
I've often wondered if the introduction of gambling as a past time of
the wealthy may have been a factor in the disappearance of the
soft-voiced instruments (the lutes, plucked keyboards, gambas,
recorders, etc.) in the eighteenth century and their replacement by
heavier, high tensioned string instruments and brass wind instruments
etc. It seems that as long as music and dancing was the past time of the
wealthy, said wealthy maintained musicians as part of their household
staffs, but that all changed when gambling became the order of the day
putting everybody out of work. In response the musicians invented the
concert hall playing for all and sundry who could afford a ticket or
subscription. Of course, then the idea would have been to put as many
rear ends in as many seats as possible making the louder instruments the
preferred instruments. This idea may have occurred to me while I sat at
the back of an audience of 300 struggling and failing to hear a solo
lute concert I paid $40 to attend. Remember Diana Spencer (Lady Di) was
heading for a casino when she had that car accident that took her life.
Gary
On 2014-03-02 13:22, Monica Hall wrote:
Many many thanks for all this fascinating information. Jourdan must
have been quite an important person in Louis' household. I have only
one
comment - Corbetta died in 1681 so he can't have succeeded Jourdon in
1695
and in any case he spent most of his last 20 years in England although
he
visited France again on a number of occasions. Perhaps he gave Louis a
few
master classes when he was in Paris.
Best
Monica
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