Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] 83

Fribert [Friberth], Joseph.

See Friebert, joseph.

Friberth [Frieberth, Friebert, Friedberg], Carl [Karl]

(b Wullersdorf, Lower Austria, 7 June 1736; d Vienna, 6 Aug 1816). Austrian tenor, librettist and composer, brother of Joseph Frieberth, with whom he is often confused. He was a musician in the Esterházy retinue from 1 January 1759, numbering among the highest-paid singers; also in 1759, Prince Paul Esterházy sent him to Italy to study singing. Haydn wrote a number of roles and arias for him and for his wife of 1769, the former Maria Magdalena Spangler, and seems to have aided their careers at Eisenstadt out of friendship. The couple took the roles of Tobias and Sarah in the première of Il ritorno di Tobia (Vienna, 1775), and Friberth wrote the libretto (in Italian) to Haydn’s opera L’incontro improvviso of the same year (based on L.H. Dancourt's La rencontre imprévue, set by Gluck); he may also have adapted Lo speziale, Le pescatrici and L’infedeltà delusa. After leaving Esterházy’s service in 1776, Friberth became Kapellmeister at Vienna’s two Jesuit churches (the Kirche Am Hof and the Universitätskirche) and at the Minoritenkirche. He retained these posts until his death and devoted himself primarily to the composition of church music, including nine masses. He also sang in Katharina Schindler’s troupe (1776), published 24 lieder in Kurzböck’s Sammlung deutscher Lieder für das Klavier (iii, 1780), and from 1771 was a member of the Vienna Tonkünstler-Societät, which he later served in various important administrative capacities. An Italian journey of 1796, underwritten by Prince Esterházy, is said to have brought him the pope’s Order of the Golden Spur. Some Italian and Latin vocal pieces by him are extant (H-P, A-Wgm, Wn, HE, KR, Wm, Z, D-Bsb, S-Smf), and there are editions of nine of his lieder (DTÖ, liv, Jg.xxvii/2, 1920/R).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Pohl and H.Botstiber: Joseph Haydn (Leipzig, 1878–1927/R)

I. Pollak-Schlaffenberg: Die Wiener Liedmusik von 1778–1800 (diss., U. of Vienna, 1914); extracts in SMw, v (1918), 97–151

L. Vobruba: Carlo Frieberth (diss., U. of Vienna, 1972)

R.V. Karpf: ‘Haydn und Carl Frieberth: Marginalien zur Gesangskunst im 18. Jahrhundert’, Joseph Haydn: Vienna 1982, 376–86

I. Fuchs and L.Vobruba: ‘Studien zur Biographie von Karl Friberth’, SMw, xxxiv (1983), 21–59

MARY HUNTER/R

Fricassée

(Fr.: ‘hash’).

A kind of Quodlibet popular in 16th-century France. The term was first used in Attaingnant’s Second livre contenant XXV chansons (Paris, 1536) and refers to a small number of pieces associated with the repertory of the Parisian chanson in which melodies and melodic fragments from French chansons were mixed and juxtaposed in a new polyphonic framework, often to witty, hilarious or obscene effect. (Like its Spanish counterpart, the ensalada, this ‘stew’ takes a gastronomic concoction as a figurative model for a musical procedure.) The musical processes at work in early fricassées may derive from some used in theoretical and practical sources of the late 15th century, in which a complete voice part from some well-known work was combined with another line crafted from many different sources – polyphonic art songs and monophonic popular songs alike. Three of the four extant fricassées of the early 16th century (an anonymous piece, as well as one each by Henry Fresneau and Jean Crespel) similarly juxtapose a complete voice from a well-known chanson by Sermisy, Janequin or Crecquillon with catchphrases from many other pieces. The eclecticism of these pieces is prodigious: Lesure identified quotations from well over 100 sources in Fresneau’s fricassée alone. Pierre Certon’s Vivre ne puis content sans ma maistresse (RISM 1538¹⁴) stands somewhat outside the radical ‘polymusicality’ of these pieces, and instead reworks only a few melodies from chansons by his friend and colleague Sermisy. The established collage technique nevertheless survived well into the second half of the 16th century: Petit Jean de Latre’s Fricassée sur les dessus de mon pouvre coeur, issued uniquely in the 1564 edition of Phalèse’s famous Septieme livre, similarly draws on chansons by Sermisy, Janequin and Northern masters such as Gombert and Crecquillon. Late examples include a Fricassée des cris de Paris in Jean Servin’s Meslanges de chansons nouvelles of 1578 (like an earlier one by Janequin, it consists exclusively of Parisian Street cries or vendors’ calls) and Denis Caignet’s five-voice fricassée N’avons point veu la peronelle from his Airs de court of 1597.

For further bibliography see Quodlibet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Cazeaux: French Music in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York and Oxford, 1975), 230–33

E. Kovarick: ‘Apropos of the Fricassée’, SMA, xii (1978), 1–24

H. Vanhulst: ‘La fricassée de Jean de Latre (1564)’, RBM, xlvii (1993), 81–90

MARIA RIKA MANIATES/RICHARD FREEDMAN

Frichot, Louis Alexandre

(b Versailles, April 1760; d Lisieux, 9 April 1825). French musician and inventor of instruments. He was the son of a cook in the service of the Duke of Burgundy, and went to England, a refugee from the Revolution, in the early 1790s. By 1793 he was playing the serpent in the Ancient Concerts orchestra and he is listed in Doane’s Musical Directory of 1794. A memoir in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review of 1825 described a ‘very extraordinary performance’ by Frichot during the 1790s on what was very probably an early Bass-horn (perhaps one like no.284 of the Carse Collection, now in the Horniman Museum, London), an instrument of his own invention. In 1800 the London music publisher and instrument dealer George Astor published A Compleat Scale and Gamut of the Bass-Horn: a New Instrument, Invented by M. Frichot. Astor also began to make bass-horns; a fine specimen, signed by Astor & Co. and dated 1807, is in F-Pc.

After the Peace of Amiens, Frichot returned to France and submitted his bass-horn to a jury of Paris music professors. Sachs referred to this instrument as ‘die erster Name der Basse-trompette’; Frichot indeed patented a Basse-trompette in 1810, but although closely related to the bass-horn the two instruments were in fact distinct (the basse-trompette having interchangeable bows of different length – pièces de rechange – for pitch adjustment). Pierre noted another instrument by Frichot, mainly wooden, with a substantial section made of brass. He described it as an early wooden two-keyed ophicleide, dating from about 1812, which had apparently been awarded a medal in England.

Frichot eventually settled at Lisieux as a teacher of music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

Grove5 (R. Morley-Pegge)

C. Pierre: ‘Un ophicleide en bois de L.A. Frichot’, La Musique des familles (18 Nov 1886), 35

C. Sachs: Real-Lexicon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R)

HOWARD MAYER BROWN/STEPHEN J. WESTON