The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music

Composers, Consumers, Communities

Marie Sumner Lott

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083846
  9780252039225
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252097270
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social History

Music played an important role in the social life of nineteenth-century Europe, and music in the home provided a convenient way to entertain and communicate among friends and colleagues. String chamber music, in particular, fostered social interactions that helped build communities within communities.

Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvoøák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment.

Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

CHAPTER 1

Publishing Chamber Music

Archival Evidence for Chamber Music Production and Consumption

Printed music played an integral role in the musical lives of the middle classes, who consumed printed media in increasingly large quantities throughout the nineteenth century as literacy of all kinds gradually extended into much of the social fabric of Europe and North America. Social and cultural historians write of a “reading craze” or reading mania in this period, and literary scholars have tracked the increase in literacy and in consumption of the written word in order to understand better the reception of all kinds of literature, from monumental histories and collections of poetry or prose to less obviously “highbrow” writings in journals, magazines, and broadsides or pamphlets. Even ephemeral printed material intended to be read and discarded or redistributed until it fell apart—items such as greeting and visiting cards, flip-books, and paper dolls—can offer insight into the consciousness of nineteenth-century society. Like these other printed forms (including items related to the visual arts, such as posters and photo albums or picture books), sheet music in the nineteenth century moved from a precious rarity to a valued commodity and gradually into the realm of ephemera, with cheap publications not intended for long keeping and use; all three categories and the various gradations in between coexisted in the nineteenth century, contributing to a vibrant musical environment. Although some editions of music were clearly intended as luxury goods—the musical monuments and special editions that were fast becoming an important part of the publisher's and musician's musical life—much printed music was produced and consumed as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly diet of consumable art. New production technologies allowed new modes of consumption, and these in turn began to influence the methods producers used to wring as much profit as possible from the trading of intellectual and artistic materials.

Chamber music in this era was typically printed and sold in sets of parts rather than in full scores. This practice reinforces the notion, now somewhat lost, that the publication of a piece of new music was intended to facilitate performance of the work, not study. In order to engage the music at all, some performance skill was necessary, unless a piano arrangement was also available. Printed music addressed an audience of instrumental performers at various levels of ability. Publication of chamber music scores in the nineteenth century tended to favor works by “Classical” composers, however the publisher construed that notion. For example, Ignaz Pleyel's series of pocket scores (his Bibliothèque Musicale, begun in 1802) included quartets and symphonies by Haydn and works by Mozart, Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and George Onslow. A similar series of smallish-format scores issued by C. F. Kistner's firm in the early 1840s included quartets and quintets by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Onslow.¹ Thus, already in the 1810s, we see the canonization process at work and the special role that publishing played in creating and reinforcing the canonic status of works by the “Classical Masters.”

This chapter investigates the institution of chamber music publishing by looking closely at three internationally significant publishers whose archives are now available to researchers looking for a clearer understanding of mid-nineteenth-century life. In all three cases, we shall see that publishers sought to balance their production of “monumental” and “ephemeral” products to establish and maintain a reliable source of income and new musical material for themselves and, by extension, the musicians who relied upon them. The publishers examined here were based in northern Germany—in Leipzig and Berlin—but distributed music throughout Europe and North America. Individually, the three firms represent different models with diverse priorities and business strategies: a small business established by a chamber music lover and copyright activist (Hofmeister); a larger firm that grew with the musical marketplace, changing hands at several points and evolving to address the needs of a growing public (Peters); and a midsize firm that specialized in practical music for private and public use (Schlesinger, later Lienau-Schlesinger). Together, these three companies give us a snapshot of the music business as it developed throughout the Romantic era. In France, England, and Austria, music firms operated on similar principles, adopting the same strategies for success and falling prey to the same misjudgments and market pressures. These three German businesses interacted with their counterparts elsewhere, operating separate branches in Paris or Vienna, for example, and employing representatives there to report back on what was popular, to acquire new works by local composers and musicians, and to nurture business relations with the various other producers of music—booksellers, performers, concert promoters, and so on.

The two Leipzig-based firms have several features in common from their shared roots in the early decades of the century, but after the midcentury mark, they adopted different business models in response to changes in musical and cultural life. Both firms specialized from their founding days in instrumental and small-ensemble music, printing few operatic works and a large number of chamber works, songs, and orchestral works. They both began as retail businesses founded by individuals (“Peters” by F. A. Hoffmeister in 1800 and “Hofmeister” by Friedrich Hofmeister in 1807) and grew into corporations with an international scope by the 1840s.

Friedrich Hofmeister established himself as a leader in the field of music publishing early in his career. He made it his life's work to organize music publishers and sellers in the German lands in order to secure fair trading practices, to serve consumers better and more efficiently, and to raise the prestige of his profession. In 1817 he began collaborating with Carl Friedrich Whistling to publish monthly or bimonthly installments of the Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur, today often referred to as the Hofmeister-Whistling catalogs.² These catalogs record what music was published by whom and at what cost to the consumer, providing an invaluable tool for modern-day researchers. In the nineteenth century, they allowed music sellers and publishers to advertise their music (and music by foreign publishers distributed in German lands) and to acquire new works for their shops, promoting collegial distribution and greater variety for the consumer.³ Hofmeister also established the Verein der Deutschen Musikalienhändler (Society of German Music Sellers) in order to promote ethical and collegial business relationships among competitors and to lobby for copyright and other legislation to protect publishers and artists from piracy. Hofmeister's firm remained a family business until its demise after World War II, at the death of the founder's great-grandson, C. W. Günther.

The firm we know today as Peters was cofounded by composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister and organist Ambrosius Kuhnel as the Bureau de Musique in Leipzig in 1800 and sold fourteen years later to C. F. Peters, who ran the business under his own name. Over the next seventy-five years, the firm changed hands several times as owners retired or died, but it retained the name Peters, which by midcentury functioned as a brand, revered throughout the German-speaking musical world (and beyond).⁴ This “branding” became even more important after the launch of the Peters Edition in 1867; works with its distinctive cover design were produced with a new speed-printing process pioneered by the firm's owners, Julius Friedländer and Max Abraham, in collaboration with engraver and inventor Carl Gottlieb Röder. The Peters Edition specialized in works the firm could produce in large quantities and emphasized items in the public domain—that is, works not subject to the new copyright laws. The firm continued to acquire works by young up-and-coming composers, buffering the investment risk of acquisitions by producing works that cost very little and brought in a large profit.

By contrast, Adolph Martin Schlesinger's firm, which he founded in Berlin in 1810, specialized in opera and opera-derived works in the first half of the century, producing full scores and arrangements of works by Weber (with whom Schlesinger negotiated exclusive publishing rights in 1814), Gaspare Spontini, Gaetano Donizetti, Fromental Halévy, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. In its early decades, the firm published music in many forms, including original chamber works, songs, piano works, and orchestral music, but it soon began to specialize in practical dance music and arrangements. For instance, a contract with the Prussian Crown prompted the publication of a collection of army marches for use by regimental bands in the 1820s. When Robert Lienau took over the firm in 1864, he introduced a focus on pedagogical works and works by younger composers, then bought several smaller publishing firms to expand his catalog, including the Viennese firm Haslinger, which published popular waltzes by Lanner and Strauss and a large collection of quadrilles and other parlor dances. Schlesinger's chamber music catalog included a large number of transcriptions created to disseminate operas and other works for larger forces in manageable formats for amateur musicians (discussed in chapter 3). In the later decades of the nineteenth century, under Lienau's leadership, opera arrangements for chamber ensembles gave way to folk songs and other folk-inspired recreational pieces for string quartet, piano trio, and other combinations. Schlesinger was only one of many firms who published such works, and the shifts in his catalog's offerings demonstrate trends noticeable in the output of other firms from the nineteenth century.

The various types of evidence these firms have left for modern historians point toward a vibrant, if volatile, market for chamber music throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, their print records (Druckbücher, or catalogs of published works, and Auflagebücher, or catalogs of impressions, including reprints) contain much information that sheds new light on the distribution and popularity of music in all its forms during the period in question. Balance sheets (Calculationsbücher) offer a glimpse at the economics of publishing music at this time and demonstrate the difficulties composers and publishers faced in making music available to a sometimes fickle public.⁵

Druckbücher and Auflagebücher: What Did Peters and Hofmeister Print?

Information drawn from sources like the Hofmeister-Whistling catalogs suggests a rapid decline in chamber music production beginning around 1830. Publishers appear to have stopped producing new works in string chamber genres or produced fewer of them in the following decades, and music in piano solo and song forms increased significantly. Music histories have tended to take this information at face value, drawing the logical conclusion that the public's interest in performing string chamber music waned during or after the Napoleonic Wars with the decline of the aristocracy. Because chamber music (especially the string quartet) had long been associated with princes and their courts, the dissolution of resources for court appointments and the like seems to have resulted in less chamber music and more widespread dissemination of songs and piano works that were accessible to a broader audience with less leisure time. The print-run catalogs of Hofmeister, Peters, and Schlesinger likewise indicate that fewer new works were published in later decades, with a precipitous drop in production in the decade between 1840 and 1850 (see figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 New works for string chamber ensemble published between 1800 and 1890 by the Hofmeister and Peters firms.

That overall impression of decline and uninterest, though, is refuted in part by the Auflagebücher kept by Peters and Hofmeister, which scrupulously list each reprint of every work published by the firms beginning with the first impression and continuing into the twentieth century. Figure 1.2 shows a page from the Hofmeister Auflagebuch. This document shows the date of each impression and the number of copies made in the right-hand column, with text running perpendicular to the other entries, which indicate from left to right the publisher's number (unique to the work or edition), the composer and title, the number of music plates created for the work, and information about the title-page engraving: “Stein” indicates a lithographed (Steingedruckt) title page, and the name or initial underneath indicates who engraved it. The Peters Auflagebuch gives similar information, though in a slightly different format, with entries ordered alphabetically by the composer's last name rather than in the order of publication. As figure 1.2 shows, some works were printed and reprinted as often as every other year, some were reprinted multiple times within the same year, and others were printed only once or twice and then abandoned. Chamber works were frequently printed in small initial print runs of fifty to one hundred copies and then reprinted in increments of twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred depending on demand. In some cases, a work was reprinted in increasingly larger print runs, presumably because the public liked it and new consumers wanted to acquire their own copies.

FIGURE 1.2 Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister of Leipzig, Auflagebuch (1832–39), Sächsische Staatsarchiv, Staatsarchiv-Leipzig, 21072, no. 43, F. 12963, page 76.

When we add the number of reprinted works produced in any given decade to the number of new works published at the same time, a more complex picture of the chamber music marketplace emerges (see figure 1.3). Certainly the number of new works and the number of overall works produced both declined over the course of the century, but that decline is less drastic and less straightforward than the number of new publications alone indicates. These data suggest a continuing demand for chamber music throughout the nineteenth century, though that demand seems to have shifted to older works, with new works less highly sought-after than reprints of favorite pieces and works by familiar composers.

FIGURE 1.3 Total number of works printed for string chamber ensembles between 1800 and 1900 by the Hofmeister and Peters firms, including reprints.

These familiar older works do not, in the main, include music by today's revered masters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were reprinted and distributed in the nineteenth century, they did not represent a significant area of commercial activity until fairly late in the period. Table 1.1 shows the number of works printed by Peters and Hofmeister, organized by genre, and it indicates which composers’ works they published. Note that Peters published nearly twice as many string quartets and quintets as any other chamber genre in the firm's catalog and that Hofmeister published half again as many quartets as works with piano. Although modern discussions of Romantic chamber music frequently highlight the development of the piano quartet and quintet as significant innovations by composers such as Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, these genres did not make up a large percentage of the firms’ chamber music outputs. They were far outnumbered by works for strings alone and for piano trio, both of which were reprinted regularly and therefore retained a strong position in the musical life of the age. In this way, music history has distorted the relationship between “new” and “old” genres in the nineteenth century and given special prominence to two exceptional works.⁶ Tables 1.2 and 1.3 show the most reprinted works by genre for both firms—their “best sellers” list, as determined by the number of copies printed over time. In both cases, a firm's most popular composers in a given genre were also the most prolific, suggesting that these composers and their publishers had hit upon a formula for success that benefited both.

TABLE 1.1 String chamber works printed by Hofmeister and Peters

Note: A number in parentheses following a composer's name indicates the number of distinct works composed by that composer and published by the firm if more than one. For example, Hofmeister published six distinct string quartets by Dotzauer and only one by Fesca.

Peters's most successful and popular composer of string chamber music for most of the nineteenth century was the violin virtuoso Louis Spohr (1784–1859), the Kapellmeister in Kassel (then the seat of power for the electorate of Hesse) from 1822 to his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Musical Examples
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: String Chamber Music and its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century
• 1. Publishing Chamber Music: Archival Evidence for Chamber Music Production and Consumption
• 2. “Domesticating” the Foreign in Arrangements of Operas, Folk Songs, and Other Works for Chamber Ensembles
• 3. Music for Men of Leisure: An Examination of the Domestic String Style
• 4. Redefining the “Progressive” Style in Responses to Beethoven's Late Quartets
• 5. Creating “Progressive” Communities through Programmatic Chamber Music
• 6. Audience and Style in Brahms's String Chamber Music
• 7. The Diversity of Dvořák's String Quartet Audiences
• Appendix 1: J. Strunz, String Quartet Transcription of No. 18, “Prière” (Prayer), from Meyerbeer's Robert Le Diable
• Appendix 2: C. W. Henning, String Quartet Transcription of No. 8, “Leise, Leise, Fromme Weise” (Gently, Gently, Pious Words), from Weber's Der Freischütz
• Appendix 3: M. Kässmayer, String Quartet Arrangement of “Mein Herz ist im Hochland” (My Heart is in the Highlands) from Deutsche Lieder, Op. 14, No. 4
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author