Author: RODOLPHE (Jean Joseph):
Title: Solfeges, Ou, Nouvelle Methode de musique Par Demandes et Réponses Divisées en deux Parties: La premiere contient la Théorie de cet Art: La seconde, les Leçons avec la Basse et les Gradations nécessaires pour parvenir aux difficultés.... Seconde Edition revue et corrigee par l'Auteur.
Description: A Paris Chez Boyer et Naderman, facteur de harpe et d'autres instrumens: au Magazin de musique, R. [i.e., Rue] de la Loi, à la Clef d'Or, Passage de l'ancien Caffé de Foy, [1790] [1790]. Folio, 331 x 246 mms., pp. [ii], 166, folding engraved plate of keyboard at end and otherwise engraved throughout, contemporary quarter green sheepskin, boards; front free end-paper creased, binding a little rubbed, but a good copy with the autograph "Mlle. Julie Mallet" on the top margin of the recto of the front free end-paper. Julie Mallet was later the third wife of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 - 1829), whom he married in 1798 after the death of his wife Charlotte in 1797. Jean Joseph Rodolphe (1730-1812), also known as Johann Joseph Rudolph, was an Alsatian composer, violinist, and horn player. His early career was in Stuttgart, where several of his operas and ballets were performed. This work, first published in 1784, proved very popular with performers and students and was regularly reprinted until the 1850s. From 1798 he was a professor at the Paris Conservatory. He popularized the horn as a solo instrument, and was probably the first in Paris to use the technique of hand-stopping, by which a natural horn can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. Two manuscript inscriptions in this copy are noteworthy. First, one of the two publishers, Naderman, signs with a surname, no doubt to certify the authenticity of this copy, in the lower right corner of the title-page. I assume this is the original proprietor, Jean-Henri Naderman (1734-1799), but it is conceivably his wife, Barbe-Rose Naderman, who took over the business upon his death in February 1799. The second inscription is "Mlle. Julie Mallet", presumably the woman of that name who famously became the third and final wife of the controversial biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), after whom Lamarckian evolutionary theory is named. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Lamarck to the field of biology, even if he is often seen primarily as a precursor to Darwin. Lamarck is credited with being the first to use the term itself, "biology", in "its modern sense"; and "Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory consisted of the first truly cohesive theory of biological evolution" (Wikipedia). The only more prominent name in evolutionary theory from the century is that of Charles Darwin himself. Stephen Jay Gould has argued "that Lamarck was the 'primary evolutionary theorist', in that his ideas, and the way in which he structured his theory, set the tone for much of the subsequent thinking in evolutionary biology, through to the present day" (Wikipedia). Mademoiselle Julie Mallet married Lamarck in 1798, at about the age of thirty, but she died young on August 27, 1819 (see the online "Chronologie de la vie de Jean-Baptiste Lamarck" by Raphaël Bange and Pietro Corsi). Very little appears to be known about Mallet, both before and after her marriage to Lamarck. I take the volume on offer to indicate that she either played a musical instrument or aspired to do so, which is more detail about her character or person than I have been able to glean from any other source, apart from the most basics facts already mentioned, such as the date of her marriage, her age at marriage, and the date of her premature death.

Keywords: music composition prose


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