page_title: Franz Xaver Richter
section_title: 1770 Richter meets Marie Antoinette
hierarchical_section_title: Franz Xaver Richter / Biography / 1770 Richter meets Marie Antoinette
context_page_description: Franz Xaver Richter, known as François Xavier Richter in France was an Austro-Moravian singer, violinist, composer, conductor and music theoretician who spent most of his life first in Austria and later in Mannheim and in Strasbourg, where he was music director of the cathedral. From 1783 on Haydn’s favourite pupil Ignaz Pleyel was his deputy at the cathedral.
  The most traditional of the first generation composers of the so-called Mannheim school, he was highly regarded in his day as a contrapuntist. As a composer he was equally at home in the concerto and the strict church style. Mozart heard a mass by Richter on his journey back from Paris to Salzburg in 1778 and called it charmingly written. Richter, as a contemporary engraving clearly shows, must have been one of the first conductors to actually have conducted with a music sheet roll in his hand.
  Richter wrote chiefly symphonies, concertos for woodwinds, trumpet, chamber and church music, his masses receiving special praise. He was a man of a transitional period, and his symphonies in a way constitute one of the missing links between the generation of Bach and Handel and the Viennese classic.
context_section_description: In 1770 Marie Antoinette, future queen of France, on her way from Vienna to Paris passed through the Alsatian capital, where she stayed at the Episcopal Palace, the Palais Rohan. Richter, who almost certainly directed the church music when Marie Antoinette went to mass the next day, witnessed the earliest stages of historical events that would later contribute to the downfall of the French monarchy. The prelate who greeted Marie Antoinette on the steps of the cathedral, probably in Richter's presence, was the same Louis Rohan who would later, duped by a prostitute impersonating Marie Antoinette, trigger the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. Several historians and writers think that this bizarre episode undermined the trust of the French in their queen and thus hastened the onset of the French Revolution.
  But Richter did not live to see this. What he saw was Strasbourg all dressed up to greet the Dauphiness:
  "The city of Strasburg was in gala array. It had prepared for the dauphiness the splendours it had displayed 25 years before for the journey of Louis the Well-beloved. (...) Three companies of young children from twelve to fifteen years of age, habited as Cent-Suisses, formed the line along the passage of the princess. Twenty-four young girls of the most distinguished families of Strasbourg, dressed in the national costume, strewed flowers before her; and eighteen shepherds and shepherdesses presented her with baskets of flowers. (...)
  On the following day (May 8, 1770) Marie Antoinette visited the cathedral. By a strange coincidence the prelate who awaited her with the chapter at the entrance to felicitate her, and who greeted her "the soul of Maria Theresa about to unite itself to the soul of the Bourbons", was the nephew of the bishop, that prince, Louis de Rohan, who was later to inflict upon the dauphiness, become queen, the deadliest of injuries. But in the midst of the then so brilliant prospect who could discern these shadows?"
caption: Marie Antoinette (1769)
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