Jean-Baptiste Stuck
Jean-Baptiste Stuck - composer
Person from France
Genres: baroque, 18th century, italian, classical period, barocco italiano
Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville
About Jean-Baptiste Stuck
(b 1680; d Paris, 8 Dec 1755). Italian composer and cellist of German descent. He called himself ‘Florentin’, although Lesure gives Livorno as his birthplace. In the libretto of Rodrigo in Algeri (Naples, 1702), a reworking of Albinoni’s L’inganno innocente, he was called ‘virtuoso della Contessa di Lemos’. His appearance in Paris was marked by the publication of an aria in Ballard’s Recueil d’airs sérieux of 1705. He lived well at the hôtel of his patron, the Prince of Carignan, until the prince's death in 1740. The title-pages of his four books of cantatas (1706–14) reveal that he was also favoured by the italophile Duke of Orléans and made an ‘Ordinaire de la musique’. La prise de Lérida, from book 2, celebrates a military victory that may also have been the inspiration for his Te Deum, commissioned by the duchess and performed at the Palais Royal on 27 November 1707. In 1708 Stuck wrote an italian aria for a revival of Collasse’s Thétis et Pélée. However, his first two French operas, Méléagre and Manto la fée, performed in 1709 and 1711, were not well received. According to Loewenberg, Stuck left France to spend some time in the service of Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria (c1714). His opera Il cid was performed at Livorno at Carnival 1715, and in the same year he married Bonne-Françoise Berain, daughter of Louis XIV’s court painter. He was awarded a pension of 500 livres as ordinaire de la musique du Roy on 18 December 1718. His third French opera, Polydore, was presented in 1720 and revived in 1739, and his duet cantata Démocrite et Héraclite was performed at the Opéra in November 1722. The death of the librettist La Font in 1725 prevented him completing his opera Orion, but an arietta from it appeared in the Mercure. He was active at the Concert Spirituel: an aria, four cantatas and the divertissement L’union de la musique italienne et françoise were given 18 performances between 1727 and 1729; Stuck, the violinist Jean-Pierre Guignon and flautist Michel Blavet played a trio on 24 and 25 December 1728; and one of his motets was performed on 13 April 1738. Stuck, now ‘M.L. Baptiste’, became a French citizen in June 1733. The inventory made after his wife's death in 1741 and his will dated 12 September 1752 survive in the Archives Nationales. Although Stuck was not, as La Borde stated, the first to play the cello at the Opéra, the success of his performances as a soloist hastened the decline in the bass viol's popularity. Ancelet and Maisonelle agreed that he was the first cellist to be admired in France, and Corrette wrote that the rise to prominence of the cello began with the arrival in Paris of Stuck and L’Abbé (Philippe Pierre de Saint-Sévin). His French cantatas are notable for their italianisms and the extent to which he used accompanying instruments. Of particular interest is Démocrite et Héraclite, which musically juxtaposes two allegorical figures, Optimism and Pessimism. D’Aquin de Château-Lyon wrote that in the realm of the cantata Stuck was ‘the rival of Clérambault’.
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