“The promised land of music”: Jan Teding van Berkhout in Italy, 1739–1741

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In February 1739 the young Dutch patrician Jan Teding van Berkhout, aged 26, set off on his Grand Tour through France and Italy. Initially, he travelled in the company of his distant relative Johan Aegidius van Egmond van de Nijenburgh, who was sent on a diplomatic mission to Don Carlos de Bourbon, King of Naples and Sicily, by the States General. Jan recorded his experiences in his incompletely preserved travel diary and in his voluminous correspondence with as many as five relatives, both items today housed in the National Archive in The Hague. Both the travel diary and nearly all of the letters are written in an unsophisticated French with absolutely no literary pretensions. These documents are, however, of interest to us because of the fact that they contain many references to musical life in the cities and regions that were visited. Jan’s passion for music did not take second place to his love for attractive women, a passion shared by his brother Pieter, whose music teacher in Leiden was no less distinguished a person than Egidio Romualdo Duni. During his Grand Tour Jan continued to take lessons in singing and in harpsichord and cello playing. He seized almost every opportunity to attend opera theatres, churches, private academies and other locales where music was performed, often setting down in a detailed manner the impressions of the music he had heard and the composers or singers that he had met. In addition, Jan made regular shipments home of vocal and instrumental music that he had ordered to be copied or received as a gift. Identification of the many musical personalities whom Jan met and the places that he visited is sometimes rendered more difficult by the inconsistencies of his spelling, but a comparison with other sources of the time and musicological literature has enabled the author to resolve most problematic cases.