Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (26 September 1723See Friedrich Melchior von Grimm (FactGrid Q421806), retrieved 29 June 2022.19 December 1807) was a German-born French-language journalist, art critic, diplomat and contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.Frank A. Kafker: Notices sur les auteurs des dix-sept volumes de « discours » de l'Encyclopédie. Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie. 1989, Volume 7, Numéro 7, p. 142 In 1765 Grimm wrote Poème lyrique, an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos.Larousse Dictionnaire de la musiqueMusic and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment by Downing A. Thomas, p. 148.Lully Studies by John Hajdu Heyer, p. 248A History of Western Musical Aesthetics by Edward A. Lippman, p. 171 Like Christoph Willibald Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi, Grimm became interested in opera reform. According to , a German literary theorist, "sooner or later a book entitled The Aesthetic Ideas of Grimm will have to be written.""Wolfgang Amadé Mozart" by Georg Knepler, p. 43.
Early years
Grimm was born at Regensburg, the son of Johann Melchior Grimm (1682–1749), a pastor, and Sibylle Margarete Grimm (née Koch) (1684–1774). He studied theology and law at the University of Leipzig, where he came under the influence of Johann Christoph Gottsched and of Johann August Ernesti, to whom he was largely indebted for his critical appreciation of classical literature. When nineteen, he produced a tragedy, Banise, which met with some success. After two years of studying literature and philosophy, he returned to his hometown, where he was attached to the household of Count Johann Friedrich von Schönberg. In 1749, he accompanied his friend Gottlob Ludwig von Schönberg, and his pupil, the younger brother to Paris. There, (1727–1755) appointed him as his secretary. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions that Grimm played a cembalo and acted also as reader to Frederick Louis, the eldest son of Frederick III, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha.
His acquaintance with Rousseau soon ripened into warm friendship, through a mutual sympathy in regard to music and theater, and led to a close association with the Encyclopaedists Diderot, Baron d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Morellet and Helvétius, who were meeting at the salon of Madame Boufflers, Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon. He rapidly obtained a thorough knowledge of the French language and acquired so perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed effaced.
In 1750, he started to write for the Mercure de France on German literature and the ideas of Gottsched. In 1752, at the beginning of the Querelle des Bouffons, he wrote Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale.The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815, by John Spitzer, Neal Zaslaw, p. 186.; Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale ... Grimm complained that the text of the libretto had no connection with the music. Grimm and Rousseau became the enemy of Élie Catherine Fréron. In 1753, he wrote a witty pamphlet entitled Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda, "a parable about a Bohemian boy being sent to Paris to see the lamentable state into which the French opera has descended". Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754, p. 276. This defence of Italian opera established his literary reputation. It is possible that the origin of the pamphlet is partly to be accounted for by his vehement passion for Marie Fel, the prima donna of the Paris Opéra,Spectacles de Paris, 1752, p. 87 who was one of the few French singers capable of performing Italian arias.M. Grimm, Lettre sur Omphale, 1752, p. 50. When she refused him —and stayed in relation with Louis de Cahusac— Grimm fell into lethargy. Rousseau and Abbé Raynal took care of him.
In 1753, following the example of Abbé Raynal, and with the latter's encouragement, Grimm began a literary newsletter with various German sovereigns. The first number of the was dated 15 May 1753.Ulla Kölving, "Introduction générale" to idem (ed.): Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Correspondance littéraire. Tome 1: 1753–1754, Ferney-Voltaire, Centre International d’Étude du xviiie siècle, 2006, pp. XXI–LXXII With the aid of friends, especially of Diderot and Mme d'Épinay, who reviewed many plays, always anonymously, during his temporary absences from France, Grimm himself carried on the , which consisted of two letters a month that were painstakingly copied in manuscript by amanuenses safely apart from the French censor in Zweibrücken, just over the border in the Palatinate.
Eventually, Grimm counted among his 16 (or 25) subscribers: Princess Luise Dorothea of Saxe-Meiningen, Princess Caroline Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, Princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia and Queen of Sweden, Prince Henry of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, Gustav III of Sweden, and many princes of the smaller German states, as Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden, Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Charles Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, William Henry, Prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken, and Frederick Michael, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken. Between 1763 and 1766, Grimm attempted to recruit Prussian king Frederick the Great as a subscriber, his two siblings were already subscribers. Mme Geoffrin, whose Paris salon Grimm frequented, enrolled Stanislas Poniatowski as a subscriber, writing him:
"Here is your first number, together with Grimm's accompanying letter. Your Majesty will see that it is important that no copies be made. The German courts are very loyal to Grimm in this particular. I may even say to Your Majesty that negligence on this point could have serious consequences for me, the matter having passed through my hands."Mme Geoffrin to Stanislaus Augustus, quoted in Francis Steegmuller, 1991, p. 249, note 1.
The correspondence of Grimm was strictly confidential and was not divulged during his lifetime. It embraces nearly the whole period from 1750 to 1790, but the later volumes, 1773 to 1790, were chiefly the work of his secretary, the Swiss (1744–1826), with whom he made acquaintance in the salon of Suzanne Curchod, the wife of Jacques Necker. At first he contented himself with enumerating the chief current views in literature and art and indicating very slightly the contents of the principal new books, but gradually his criticisms became more extended and trenchant, and he touched on nearly every subject — political, literary, artistic, social and religious — that interested the Parisian society of the time. His notices of contemporaries are somewhat severe, and he exhibits the foibles and selfishness of the society in which he moved; but he was unbiased in his literary judgments, and time has only served to confirm his criticisms. In style and manner of expression, he is thoroughly French. He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle, and it was the opinion of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire. His religious and philosophical opinions were entirely sceptical.
Content of the
For several years, Grimm reported on the painters and paintings in the Salon de Paris, and was successfully succeeded by Diderot; he appreciated the architects Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the naturalist and mathematician Buffon, the mathematician Leonhard Euler, and the political scientist Condorcet. Grimm asked Diderot to review Voyage autour du monde ("A Voyage Round the World") by Louis Antoine de Bougainville.Jürgen von Stackelberg: Diderot. Artemis-Verlag, München 1983, , p. 107 Grimm had paid attention to the case Jean Calas,Grimm's , 1763 the problems between Rousseau and David Hume,Grimm's , 1766 the Montgolfier brothers, and Madame de Staël when she published her Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau.Historical & literary memoirs and anecdotes by Friedrich Melchior Grimm (Freiherr von), Denis Diderot, p. 353. The became one of the influential media to spread malicious and false information on Rousseau.
Grimm did not appreciate Mondonville's Daphnis et Alcimadure, though he approved the use of the Occitan language, as being closer to Italian; according to Grimm "In Zoroastre it is day and night alternately but as the poet ... cannot count up to five he has got so muddled in his reckoning that he has been compelled to make it be day and night two or three times in each act so that it might be day at the end of the play". He wrote about Caffarelli and about Pierre Beaumarchais.Claude Manceron (1972). Les Hommes de la liberté I. Les vingt ans du Roi 1774–1778, p. 160. Grimm didn't think much of Antoine de Léris: "The author claims that the public received his work with indulgence. If perfect oblivion may so be called, the author is right to be grateful"; (Grimm, February 1763). The diminished continued without Grimm until the revolutionary year 1790.
Connections In 1755, after the death of Count von Friesen (1727–1755), who was a nephew of Marshal Maurice de Saxe and an officer in the French army, Grimm secured a sinecure worth 2 000 livres a year as secrétaire des commandements to Marshal d'Estrées on the Westphalia campaign of 1756–1757 during the Seven Years' War. In 1759, he was named envoy of the free-town of Frankfurt am Main to the French court, but was deprived of his office for criticizing Victor François de Broglie, 2nd Duke of Broglie in a dispatch intercepted by Louis XV's secret service.
Rousseau In 1751, Grimm was introduced by Rousseau to Madame d'Épinay, with whom he began a 30-year liaison two years later, which led after four years to an irreconcilable rupture between him, Diderot and Rousseau.
Grimm and d'Holbach supported financially the mother of Thérèse Levasseur. Instead of Rousseau, Grimm accompanied Mme. d'Épinay to Geneva to visit doctor Théodore Tronchin. Rousseau believed Grimm had made her pregnant.
Grimm criticized Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise and Émile, or On Education. Rousseau was induced by his resentment to give in his Confessions a malicious portrait of Grimm's character. Grimm's betrayals of his closest friend, Diderot, finally led Diderot to bitter denunciations of him too in his Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal à M. Grimm in 1781.
In 1783, Grimm lost Mme Épinay, his most intimate friend, and the following year 1784, died Denis Diderot.
Not long after, he showed Prince Henry of Prussia, on a diplomatic trip, in Paris.
Mozart's three visits to Paris
Leopold Mozart decided to take his two child prodigies, the seven-year-old boy, Wolfgang (born 27 January 1756), and the 12-year-old girl, Nannerl (Maria Anna, born 30 July 1751), on their "Grand Tour" in June 1763. Mozart's first visit to Paris lasted from 18 November 1763 to 10 April 1764, when the family departed for London. All the many letters of recommendation carried by Leopold proved ineffectual, except the one to Melchior Grimm, which led to an effective connection. Grimm was a German who had moved to Paris at age 25 and was an advanced amateur of music and opera, which he covered as a Paris-based journalist for the aristocracy of Europe. He was persuaded "to take the German prodigies under his wing." Grimm published a highly supportive article on the Mozart children in his Correspondance littéraire of December 1763, to facilitate Leopold's entrée into Parisian high society and musical circles.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography, by Piero Melograni, p. 15Mozart's Chamber Music with Keyboard, by Martin Harlow, p. 29The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, by Cliff Eisen, Simon P. Keefe, p. 387.