Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm
According to Martin Fontius [de], a German literary theorist, "sooner or later a book entitled The Aesthetic Ideas of Grimm will have to be written.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions that Grimm played a cembalo and acted also as reader to the eldest son of Frederick III, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha.
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 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".
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,[2][13] who was one of the few French singers capable of performing Italian arias.
d'Épinay, who reviewed many plays, always anonymously, during his temporary absences from France, Grimm himself carried on the Correspondance littéraire, which consisted of two letters a month[2] 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, Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, 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.
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 Jakob Heinrich Meister [de], with whom he made acquaintance in the salon of Suzanne Curchod, the wife of Jacques Necker.
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.
He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle, and it was the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire.
[20] Grimm had paid attention to the case Jean Calas,[21] the problems between Rousseau and David Hume,[22] the Montgolfier brothers, and Madame de Staël when she published her Letters on the works and character of J.J.
[citation needed] 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 2000 livres a year as secrétaire des commandements to Marshal d'Estrées on the Westphalia campaign of 1756–57 during the Seven Years' War.
In 1759, he was named envoy of the town of Frankfurt am Main to the French court, but was deprived of his office for criticizing the comte de Broglie in a dispatch intercepted by Louis XV's secret service.
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.
[33][34][35] Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the son of Grimm's employer, helped the Mozarts perform in Versailles, where they stayed for two weeks over Christmas and New Year.
"[38][e] However, Abert warns that the reason why Grimm's Journal "nonetheless needs to be treated with caution is due to the personality of its principal contributor, for Grimm was not sufficiently well trained as a musician to do justice to the art that he was describing, nor was he the man to let slip the opportunity for a flash of wit or eloquent turn of phrase, even if it meant violating the truth in the process.
[39] But Mozart mostly encountered a series of disappointments, while tragedy struck when Anna Maria fell ill with typhoid fever[40] and died on 3 July 1778.
[41] After the death of his mother, Mozart moved in with Grimm who was living with Mme d'Épinay, at 5, rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin.
Mozart stayed more than two months in pretty little room for invalids with a very agreeable prospect, which belonged to Louise d'Épinay; he sometimes dined with them but most of the time he was out.
The city was "indescribably dirty"; Grimm complained he was "not running around enough" to get pupils, as he found that calling on his introductions was tiring, too expensive, and unproductive: "People pay their respects, and that's it.
"[46] He never got paid for his Concerto for flute and harp in C, K. 299, written for the Duke of Guines and his daughter, nor for his ballet Les petits riens K.
Then Mozart wrote a Sinfonia concertante in E flat major K. 297b, for a group of four wind players from Mannheim, which he sold to Legros without keeping a copy.
Grimm's introduction to Catherine II of Russia took place at Saint Petersburg in 1773, when he was in the suite of Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt on the occasion of her marriage to the Tsarevitch Paul.
[62] Grimm introduced Ferdinando Galiani and Cesare Beccaria, and promoted Jean Huber and Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in the Russian Empire.
In 1779, he introduced Giacomo Quarenghi as an architect and Clodion as a sculptor, when Étienne Maurice Falconet came back to Paris.
Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique ..., depuis 1753 jusqu'en 1769, was edited, with many excisions, by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard and published at Paris in 1812, in 6 vols.
A supplementary volume appeared in 1814; the whole correspondence was collected and published by Jules-Antoine Taschereau [fr], with the assistance of A. Chaudé, in a Nouvelle Édition, revue et mise dans un meilleur ordre, avec des notes et des éclaircissements, et oil se trouvent rétablies pour la première fois les phrases supprimées par la censure impériale (Paris, 1829, 15 vols.
8vo); and the Correspondance inédite, et recueil de lettres, poésies, morceaux, et fragments retranchés par la censure impériale en 1812 et 1813 was published in 1829.
Grimm's Mémoire Historique sur l'origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l'impératrice Catherine II jusqu'au décès de sa majesté impériale, and Catherine's correspondence with Grimm (1774–1796) were published by Yakov Grot in 1880, in the collection of the Russian Imperial Historical Society.
