The Ups and Downs of Louis Grabu

Abstract

This article explores the career of Louis Grabu, Master of the Music to Charles II of England and an important but often overlooked and unnecessarily denigrated figure in the history of English music and music-making during the last third of the seventeenth century. While both his origins and his ultimate fate remain obscure, Grabu's activities between 1665 and 1694 are sufficiently documented to enable us not only to trace in considerable detail the periodic fluctuations in his fortunes, but also to establish a paradigm for exploring the lives of the vast number of seventeenth-century court musicians whose personal details must be gleaned from a mix of administrative records, surviving musical compositions and occasional observations recorded in contemporary diaries and correspondence. When these sources are carefully and exhaustively mined, a picture begins to emerge that belies the often glib dismissal of the musician's activities and abilities by contemporaries and modern scholars alike.