The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Jacques II Dalibert
an assemblage of "Fugitive Pieces" in lieu of a biography
For almost twenty years, Jacques II Dalibert kept cropping up in my research!
I met him first in the memoirs of the Grande Mademoiselle, Madame de Guise's half-sister. Then he surfaced in the notarial archives at the Archives Nationales, where I discovered that his mother was née Charpentier. (Although I tracked the family back to the early 1600s, I never found a connection to Marc-Antoine Charpentier.) Jacques II Dalibert next surfaced in the diplomatic dispatches of the Foreign Affairs Archives at the Quai d'Orsay, Paris. And then I encountered him in Queen Christina of Sweden's papers in the library of the Medical School, Montpellier (and eventually in the rest of her papers, now in the Royal Archives of Stockholm). Finally, I recognized his hand in the papers at the Archivo di Stato of Turin. Whenever Dalibert and I crossed paths, I jotted down key passages, and sometimes entire letters or notarial acts. I had no intention of writing a "biography" of this amazing man, whose life had already been sketched by Alberto Cametti (see below). Indeed, for my Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier I limited myself to a brief word portrait of Jacques II Dalibert. And although neither Dalibert nor Christina of Sweden appear onstage in Beth L. and Jonathan E. Glixon's new book on Venetian opera (Inventing the Business of Opera), they stand in the wings of that very fine book, nodding their heads in agreement. So much of what the Glixons write about Venice also applies to Jacques II Dalibert and to his experiences at the Roman court of Christina, at the court in Turin, and at his Tor di Nona Theater!
Reading the Glixons' book brought Dalibert back into my center stage.
Nearly 6 inches of files about him and the Queen in my study troubled my
conscience: "Don't keep that wonderful information to yourself," it kept
muttering. To silence that nagging voice, I have cobbled together,
mainly in chronological order, the evidence I found about Jacques II
Dalibert. To tie together the disparate elements of my narrative, I
occasionally cite a text in two separate web pages.
The "fugitive"
and incomplete biography that results consists of ten parts:
The Jean Charpentiers and their
son-in-law, Jacques I Dalibert
Jacques I Dalibert: his children and his career
Jacques II Dalibert, an adolescent
diplomat
Jacques II Dalibert,
secretary to Queen Christina of Sweden, part 1, 1662-1666
Jacques II Dalibert, secretary to
Queen Christina of Sweden, part 2, 1666-1689
Queen Christina: music and theater
Festivities at the French Embassy in
Rome
Jacques II Dalibert: music and
theater in Rome and in Turin
Jacques II Dalibert, the final decades
Excerpts about Dalibert and
Christina, from Franckenstein's Histoire (1697), with facts that
either corroborate or contradict the contents of this anonymous source
Some sources and the abbreviations used in this mini-biography on
Jacques II Dalibert
AAE Archives of the Affaires Etrangères, Paris
Ademollo Alessandra Ademollo, I teatri di Roma nel secolo
decimosettimo (Rome, 1888)
AdiS Archivio di Stato (the
appropriate city is specified)
AN Archives nationales, Paris
AN, MC Archives nationales, Paris, Minutier central des notaires
Archenholz Archenholz, Mémoires concernant Christine Reine de
Suède pour servir d'éclaircissement à l'histoire de son règne et
principalement de sa vie privée (Amsterdam-Leipzig, 1751), 2 vols
Bildt Baron de Bildt, Christine de Suède et le cardinal
Azzolino, Lettres inédites (1666-1668) (Paris, 1899)
Bjurström
Per Bjurström, Feast and Theater in Queen Christina's Rome
(Stockholm, 1966)
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Cametti, "D'Alibert" Alberto Cametti, "Giacomo D'Alibert costruttore
del primo theatro pubblico di musica in Roma," Nuova antologia,
rivista di lettere, scienze et arti, 7th series, vol. 275 (Feb.
1931) This article is the basic biography of Dalibert. I do not repeat
everything Cametti found, but my "fugitive" biography contains many
materials not consulted by Cametti.
Cametti, "Cristina" Alberto
Cametti, "Cristina di Svezia, l'arte musicale e gli spettacoli teatrali
in Roma," Nuova antologia, rivista di lettere, scienze et arte,
5th series, vol. 155 (1911), pp. 641-656
Cametti, Tordinona
Alberto Cametti, Il Teatro Tordinona, poi di. Apollo (Tivoli,
1938)
Clementi Filippo Clementi, Il carnavale romano nelle
cronache contemporanee (Florence, 1939), vol. I.
Franckenstein
C.G. Franckenstein, ed., Histoire des Intrigues galantes de la
Reine Christine de Suède et de sa cour pendant son séjour à Rome
(Amsterdam: J. Henri, 1697)
Glixon Inventing the Business of
Opera: the Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice
(Oxford, OUP, 2006) This is fundamental reading if one wishes to
understand Jacques II Dalibert's career as an impresario.
Montpellier Montpellier, France, Library of the School of Medicine, H
258: Christina of Sweden's papers.