“The Plunder and Restitution of Vg: The Nazi Era and its Aftermath, 1940–9,”The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, Introductory Study, by Lawrence Earp with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau, DIAMM Publications, 2014. American Musicological Society, Claude V. Palisca Award 2015

Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377)
Cover (left), Messe de Nostre Dame, Folio 283 verso (right)
Photo credit and © Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, University of Oxford

Georges Wildenstein fled Paris in 1940, depositing the Machaut manuscript in safe No. 6 at the Bank of France in Paris, one of 432 objects he had placed there for safety. On October 30, 1940, the Devisenschutzkommando Frankreich [Foreign Currency Control for France] confiscated the contents of Wildenstein’s safe. Because of its significant musical content the Machaut manuscript was grouped with looted musical manuscripts, printed music, books, musical instruments, phonograph records, historical correspondence and other musicalia and shipped to Germany. As the war raged, this medieval codex was evacuated by the Nazi Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg to the Bavarian countryside for safekeeping and would later be discovered by the U.S. Army just weeks after the end of World War II in a “castle full of pianos, accordions, violins, etc.”

Shapreau’s contribution to The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, Introductory Study traces the darkest known chapter in the medieval manuscript’s history. This manuscript “has a value over such an exceptionally wide field of medieval studies, encompassing music, literature, art, and the patronage of learning, every one of them at the very highest level…. The Ferrell-Vogüé Codex was copied for the first time in the 1380s and most recently in 2014: both occasions launched it into the astonished world, and its story is not yet finished.” Christopher de Hamel

This research was supported, in part, by the France-Berkeley Fund.