chapter 12
Libraries and Archives
Introduction
The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a rise in the systematic collecting of music manuscripts, prints, and rare books that in a number of ways differed markedly from tendencies in music collecting in earlier centuries. Even if considerable private collections were amassed by several eighteenth-century music scholars and composers—such as Martin Gerbert (1720–1793), Giovanni Battista “Padre” Martini (1706–1784), and Charles Burney (1726–1814)—there are a number of elements of nineteenth-century collecting that are characteristic of the intellectual culture of the long nineteenth century. Distinctive features not only relate to issues of sheer volume, infrastructure, and cataloguing—all inexorable effects of nascent institutionalism and professionalism in musical librarianship—but also owe their existence to the very ideals and scholarly attitudes of nineteenth-century collectors of books and music.
A nexus of intellectual undercurrents converged in that, seemingly independently, a rather diverse set of figures from 1820 to 1840 developed a passionate, and often pedantic, interest in what they saw as the “obsolete” and the “quaint” in musical sources. These two concepts were combined in a way that is today taken for granted; the performing of music from other epochs and other international contexts than one’s own was, in the nineteenth century, still a much contested activity. The same ardor for collecting was also applied to contemporary material. For scholars like Gustav Nottebohm (1817–1882), the incompleteness of sketchbooks and musical fragments by Beethoven and Schubert formed the basis for later periods of research. Such collecting and editing interests also influenced nineteenth-century composers, musicians, and audiences who did not share the collecting fervor of individual librarians and scholars, such as Reicha, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Albrechtsberger.
The infrastructure of intellectual life in the nineteenth century allowed distinguished collectors and librarians across Europe to form networks of specialist erudition. Some of these figures have become well known for their scholarly and musical achievements: François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) in Paris and Brussels, Karl Engel (1818–1882) in Manchester, Aloys Fuchs (1799–1853) in Vienna, Giuseppe Baini (1775–1844) in Rome, Karl Proske (1794–1861) in Regensburg, and Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901) in Hamburg. Others are perhaps less familiar, such as William Horsley (1774–1858), Edward Rimbault (1816–1876), and Julian Marshall (1836–1903) in London; François-Louis Perne (1772–1832) in Paris; Emil Vogel (1859–1908) in Leipzig; Henrik Rung (1807–1871) in Copenhagen; and Pehr Frigel (1750–1842) in Stockholm. Their intense and sometimes bizarre preoccupations and interactions over details of books, manuscripts, letters, and autograph scores reveals much about the role of music collecting, archiving, cataloguing, and curating in nineteenth-century intellectual culture.
Institutions and Individuals
The nineteenth century saw the foundation of a large number of institutional libraries and archives of various types. These served rather different functions, although the individuals associated with these depositories had much more in common than their institutions might initially suggest. Moreover, it is often very difficult to distinguish between institutional collections and those held by the individuals who acted as custodians of the same.
A number of meta-theoretical texts written by key figures in this period focus upon how a musical library ought to be constructed and maintained, and how a music librarian might achieve such a goal. In terms of catalogues of large nineteenth-century collections, these usually adhere to one of two basic types: either a cumulative catalogue, or a catalogue (often printed) made of a finalized collection (often related to an auction). The latter is sometimes referred to as a “dead collection,” in the sense that it is a deposited storage of information, rather than one subjected to further expansion. Catalogues from most university and conservatoire collections in the long nineteenth century have been preserved, and they tend to be ordered both systematically—on the highest level according to music scores and music literature—and in terms of musical genre or function (church music, theater music, orchestral music, chamber music, songs, etc.). Within these categories, each entry is ordered alphabetically according to author; the item’s physical location within the library or archive is often highlighted, and annotations occasionally confirm acquisition details (when numerus currens is applied, a unique number enables one to see the order in which the items have been acquired). The distinction often made today between library principles (systematic classification) and archival practice (classification according to document type and provenance) is usually not found, as there is little distinction between “bibliothecarius” and “archivarius.” Neither are distinctions between printed and manuscript sources always maintained, since instrumental and vocal parts for larger musical works (symphonies, operas, etc.) were still often produced in both forms.
In 1876, Engel noted that the Music Library of the British Museum had 60,000 entries for printed scores and musical literature, and around 250 manuscript entries. He felt that this was inadequate in terms of “the wealth and love for music of the nation,” and concluded that “anyone expecting to find in this library the necessary aids to the study of some particular branch of music is almost sure to be disappointed” (Engel 1876, 1:1). This highlights an alternative culture of scholarly collecting to that of previous centuries—an ideal library for a scholar-musician like Engel was one that we would describe today as a musicological library, rather than one where music literature could be easily retrieved from a more general catalogue. Vincent Novello (1781–1861), organist, composer, and founder of the Novello publishing house, had already written in 1824 to the English Parliament, campaigning for an English musical library worthy of comparison with the greatest on the continent; John Ella had also made plans for a private library serving the musical needs of London society (Bashford 2007, 46–47, 245–246). For Engel, Novello, and Ella, the scholarly value of a music collection was determined precisely by its systematic structure (how it was organized, catalogued, and maintained), as well as by its contents.
In terms of the expectations of a music librarian or archivist during the nineteenth century, this obviously varied depending on different contexts, but some general propensities can be identified. The first concerns musicianship. It was important for a music librarian to be a musician of the highest caliber, in order to be able to understand and appreciate the nature of the documents likely to be part of a music collection. Expertise in music theory was often highlighted as being particularly beneficial. In the process of founding the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1771, for example, it “was taken under consideration that he who will receive and bring order in all music and other documents of the Royal Academy, in the capacity of archivarius, must also to [a] perfect degree be an authority in the science of music.” At the same institutional library seventy years later, when Erik Drake (1788–1870) was appointed academy librarian and secretary as a “patently obvious successor” to Pehr Frigel, it was noted that “As a theoretician there are few Swedish musicians who could be compared to Drake, to which fact his published works testify” (Lundberg 2010, 238–239).
The conservatoires founded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often employed such specialist librarians to look after and enrich their holdings of books and manuscripts. Fétis is famous both for his private collections and for building up the libraries of the Paris Conservatoire, and later (more successfully) the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels. However, the boundaries between his private collections and those of the conservatoires were porous (Prod’homme 1931 and Eeckeloo 2008); when Fétis was discharged from the post of librarian in Paris in 1826, this did not affect his access to the holdings, nor his reputation as a librarian and scholar. Although he never formally responded to the accusations of having failed to return a number of highly valuable items, in 1840 he “donated” a number of materials to the conservatoire and other French libraries. At Fétis’s death in 1871, items missing from the old conservatoire library were identified in his private collection and were given to the French state by the Belgian government (Paul 1868, 226–227). Such permeable boundaries were not uncommon in the first half of the nineteenth century; there was little distinction, for example, between the private collections of Pehr Frigel and Siegfried Dehn (1799–1848) and those of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and the Königliche Bibliothek in Berlin, where they were the respective custodians. Similarly, Edward Rimbault sold items from his immense private music collection to the British Museum; he had evidently seized these illicitly from the collections of Christ Church, Oxford (Hiscock 1935, 394; Andrewes 1983, 31).
Although specialized music librarians could be assigned responsibility for the collections of royal, national, and learned societies active in the nineteenth century, the general pattern in such institutions was that the director or secretary of such societies was also the librarian. As in the case of the conservatoires, the reason for this was that large sums of the institutional finances were often used for the acquisition of scores and books. Foundation statutes confirm that building and maintaining a library were some of the most important tasks for a conservatoire. François-Auguste Gevaert (1828–1908), head of the Brussels Conservatoire, argued that a specialized library was a “corollaire obligé” (obligatory corollary) for any institution of education, especially so for a conservatoire (Eeckeloo 2011, 21).
National libraries, aiming to collect all publications of a particular country in a particular language, or works deemed to have particular literary, social, or political relevance to a region, expanded their musical holdings significantly during the nineteenth century. Balanced on a local level by the Ratsbücherei institutions in Germany, the more significant of these larger institutions included the Royal Library of Belgium, the Royal Danish Library, the National Library of Sweden, the British Museum (later the British Library), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (see brief historical overview in Stam 2001, 127–129). The library of the British Museum, for example, held no single manuscript of Henry Purcell’s music until the private collector Julian Marshall offered his Purcell collection for sale; his explanation for wishing to retain these culturally significant materials within a British institution, addressed to the British Museum, had a distinctly colonial flavor:
Purcell is our only great English musician—you have (I think) none of his MSS in the Museum. You will never have any (of importance) if these go to America. I do not threaten to sell them to the Americans, for I have no wish to do so, though they would give me more than I ask you for them tomorrow, if I chose to accept it. I should, however, be deeply grieved to think of their going out of the country.
(Searle 1985, 70)
When larger portions of Marshall’s library—around 450 volumes of music manuscripts and autograph scores by composers such as Purcell, Handel, and Beethoven—were sold to the British Museum in 1878–1881, major negotiations were needed over payment (via installments), given that the collection had been valued at more than £2,100 by an independent specialist (Searle 1985, 70). These negotiations highlight the concerns of all parties, not only in relation to the sums involved but also to the reputation of the former owner and new purchaser, and the status of the material itself.
Institutions were sometimes able to acquire such immense private collections wholesale. At the Brussels Conservatoire, Fétis oversaw the acquisition of the music library of Jacob Heinrich Westphal (1756–1825), which consisted of about 600 theoretical tomes, 4,000 musical scores, and around 400 portraits of composers. This acquisition explains the predominance of sources related to C. P. E. Bach and his German contemporaries in the current holdings of that library, although it is unfortunate that no extant separate catalogue, ex libris, or annotations allow us to distinguish Westphal’s collection from that of the main conservatoire library. Fétis was clear in highlighting his own role in this process, rather than the institution: “Westphal had gathered a beautiful library of musical literature and works of the great masters, which I acquired after his death” (Fétis 1866–68, 8:453).1 The study of this type of collecting culture necessitates a historiography that acknowledges how the personal, particular interests of individual scholars and librarians account for what has been preserved in our current institutions.
Music librarians were also employed as curators of larger privately owned collections, which were at risk of being dispersed upon the death of their compilers; otherwise, they could easily be scattered at auction sales, item by item. As with Marshall’s and Westphal’s libraries discussed previously, collectors often meticulously “placed” collections in institutions that could enhance their own reputations. Some private collections were intrinsically connected to acts of performance. Moravian-born Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), for example, organized concerts and salons in his home in Vienna starting in 1816, entirely based on his own collections of predominantly older music that was unknown to the majority of Viennese society at that time. Examining his programming and collecting activities, it is difficult to say whether the concerts grew out of his collecting fervor or vice versa, but his private collection—bequeathed to the Austrian National Library during his lifetime—was impressive, even compared to those of Fétis and Aloys Fuchs, and it enabled his nephew August Wilhelm Ambros (1816–1876) to develop his pioneering research on sixteenth-century music. Just as Kiesewetter deliberately enabled performances of “Seltenheiten” (rarities) and “Curiösiteten” (curiosities), which were “discovered” by collectors, so the scholar and composer François-Auguste Gevaert toured Western Europe with concerts based on music collected “from all continents and all periods”; again, such collections prioritized the idea of a musical “other,” whether of place or of time (Kiesewetter 1834, 10).
Nineteenth-century subscription or rotating libraries offered a different model, where musical scores and literature were available for hire or subscription at a fee; this fee was later often waived via the use of subsidized public funds. Many subscription or circulating libraries were formed in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, some devoted especially to music. In France these were called abonnents de musique and in German-speaking areas Musikleihhandel; culminating in the 1840s, more than thirty such enterprises advertised their services as solely dedicated to music (Breckbill and Goebes 2007, 772; Widmaier 1998, 154).
The market of music publishers was also studied in its own right, where records of sales and subscriptions were treated by scholars as important sources. George Grove published what he called A Short History of Cheap Music in 1887, drawing on the records of the publisher Novello. Here he contrasted the recent facility of procuring music at a low cost, and with little effort, with the arduous task of acquiring music in his own youth in the 1830s:
Good music at all out of the common line was either enormously dear or in manuscript, and had to be copied at the British Museum. The publications of the house of Novello and its imitators have altered all this, and have banished to the shelf a mass of copies of old Italian and old English music made during hundreds of delightful half-hours snatched from the day’s work in the old reading room in Montague Place, long before the building of Panizzi’s dome. Not that this labour was useless. On the contrary, it was fraught with good. The searching for the works, the balancing of one service, motett, madrigal, or cantata against another, the eager poring over the many volumes of Burney’s Extracts, Tudway, or Needler’s Collection, forced one involuntarily into the acquisition of much knowledge. Further, this copying taught one clefs and figured bass; it obliged one to play from score or to write one’s own accompaniment—in fact, gave one knowledge against one’s will for which the modern student has little or no occasion. (Grove 1887, vii)
Both the subscription and the public libraries catered to the requests of the bourgeois music market, which for larger parts of the nineteenth century had an interest in Lieder, aria collections, albums of character pieces for piano, symphonic movements, and overtures for four hands in affordable lithographic prints. Emil Vogel, protégé and assistant to Palestrina collector Franz Xavier Haberl (1840–1910), was one of the earliest professional librarians for a commercial public music library, as he was hired as a specialist for the library of the publisher C. F. Peters in Leipzig (Schleicher 2016). Items from the collections of this library, originating in the collections of Alfred Dörffel, could be borrowed free on the premises, and the statistics published in the Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, which Vogel edited from its inception in 1894, provided details of how many people visited the library, what they borrowed, and what was purchased each year. During 1894, its first year in the form of a publicly open library (albeit still a private enterprise), the holdings consisted of around 10,000 volumes. The reading rooms had 4,904 visitors, who consulted a total of 9,393 works, of which 5,414 were theoretical works and 3,979 “practical works,” or musical scores (Vogel 1894, 10). Among those sources most often consulted during the years 1895 to 1900 were scores by Berlioz, Wagner, Bizet, Smetana, and Liszt, highlighting how such libraries served the more up-to-date needs of amateurs and students in the Leipzig region—a contrast to the scholarly libraries that focused on older music.
The firm of Peters also held many autograph manuscripts and portraits of composers whose work they had published (and for which they held publication rights). Such valuable items were on display in the reading rooms in Leipzig, showcasing the rarer aspects of collecting culture in Germany for their library customers. Prior to Peters, the publishing house of Hofmeister grew similarly from a combination of the zeal of individual collectors and a sense for business. Friedrich Hofmeister (1782–1864), former apprentice at the publishers Breitkopf und Härtel, founded the firm in Leipzig in 1807 as a combination of publishing house, reading-room library, and music school. One of his fellow publishers and occasional collaborators, Carl Friedrich Whistling (1788–1855), produced a Handbuch der musikalischen Litteratur in 1817, which soon became a standard bibliographic tool worldwide. Published in subsequent editions in 1828 and 1844–45, supported by a plethora of supplementary volumes (1829–39, 1852–1925), it remains one of the most important sources of information on the dissemination, plate numbers, prices, and availability of printed nineteenth-century music.
Printed catalogues of any type of institution have to be interpreted in light of the fact that many celebrated nineteenth-century libraries were not open to the public. This meant that the printed and published catalogues of larger collections had an importance in themselves, offering a glimpse into a specific collector’s library. Bibliophiles and music collectors read with great interest the inventories of such published indices and catalogues, produced by a new profession of manuscript and print experts. Librarians such as Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847) were in great demand as bibliographers and catalogue experts for private collectors, and the printed catalogues produced became important publications not only in terms of the collections described but also as a guide as to how to understand books, manuscripts, and theoretical works; in Dibdin’s case, this was particularly notable in relation to the collection of the second Earl Spencer (George John) in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana (1814–1815). The broader impact on the perceived mania of collecting books and music can be gleaned from a satirical parody of a printed music collector’s catalogue published in 1862: “Catalogue of the extensive library of Dr. Rainbeau … which Messrs. Topsy, Turvy, & Co. will put up for public competition” (Hyatt King 1963, 62–63). In addition to this humorous reference to Rimbaud, the lists in the satire make fun of the details that a collector desired—highlighting “completeness,” “correctness,” and “uniqueness.”
Obsolescence and Alienation
It is clear that the common denominator behind the qualities valued in early nineteenth-century music collecting (concepts of “ancient,” “erudite,” “afar,” “distant,” “discarded,” “forgotten,” and “lost”) is the very obsolescence of both the material items and their contents. In fact, the attention among specialist collectors is often more intense the less a type of item is valued in the musical context in which the collectors were active—a sense of Entfremdung (alienation) that could be shared by musicians, scholars, and librarians regardless of their otherwise different intellectual and artistic inclinations. This exclusive cultivation and rebirth of the obsolete may partly be explained as idealizing a concept that contrasted with notions of the “modern,” “rational,” or “enlightened,” and can therefore be situated in parallel with enterprises such as those of the Grimm brothers, and Brentano and von Arnim (Des Knaben Wunderhorn). The ultimate obsolescence for many librarians and collectors was what they saw as the “dead languages” of music. A yearning for the alternative reality that rare scores and books on music offered can be compared to the fascination with the Orient of writers such as Friedrich Schlegel (where India represented the fount of “das höchste Romantische” (the highest Romanticism) and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (to whom the Orient was “die Heimath alles Wunderbaren” [home to everything wonderful]), or the Romantic fascination with the “fantastic insanity” of the Middle Ages (Schlegel 1800, 103; Wackenroder 1991, 1:201, McFarland 2014); both of these enthusiasms were indeed combined in collectors such as Kiesewetter and Fétis. One striking example of a “collecting culture” clearly focused on the Middle Ages is Scriptores de musica medii aevi, an edited series of medieval music treatises published by Edmond de Coussemaker (1805–1876) in four volumes between 1864 and 1876. Coussemaker had become interested in collecting when first reading Fétis’s articles in the Revue musicale. Although Coussemaker’s Scriptores collection and his scholarly essays published elsewhere have often been criticized in modern musicological scholarship for their philological unreliability, these represented a number of improvements (in the form of new attributions and attention to intertexts) upon Martin Gerbert’s work of the eighteenth century, whose series of editions Coussemaker deliberately intended to continue.
Antique books and scores were prized in the circles of nineteenth-century collectors as representative of a realm outside the musical culture in which they lived. This tendency can be compared to historicizing ideals in fine art and poetry in the same period or to the folkloristic ideals that ethnologists and anthropologists of the period contrasted with contemporary urban society. Sources were sometimes understood as enabling a mystical union with the “other,” or unlocking an alternate reality. That this was not entirely confined to the information which the source carried, nor to its materiality alone, but resided instead in a perceived transcendental integrity of a library item is clear from the following claim by Baron Jérome-Frédéric Pichon, an ardent book collector who held a considerable music library:
Since my earliest youth I have loved, adored books, and as all men who love, I loved everything about them, their form and their meaning. Later, I learned to appreciate their bindings and their provenance. What a pleasure to hold in one’s hands an elegantly printed book, bound in a binding contemporary with its apparition, giving the proof, by some sort of sign, that it belonged to a famous or appealing individual, and in touching this volume that he touched, read, loved, one enters into a mysterious communication with him. (Mendelson 2016, 24)
Such notions of “mysterious communication” or union with an unknown or anonymous reader from a previous age are central to many of the activities of nineteenth-century music collectors and librarians. The task of organizing a library simply heightened such awareness, as Dibdin suggests:
and what with Gibbon’s library already formed, and Harwood’s instructions how to form one of a classical calibre, my fancy took to run strangely upon BOOKS … of all qualities and conditions. An editio princeps, a vellum Aldus, a large paper copy (terms till then unknown and unappreciated) seemed to strike my mind’s eye as something magical and mysterious—just as those Arabic, or some sort of conjuration figures upon chemists’ bottles strike the eye of the body … but the catalogues of Payne, Faulder, White and Egerton exhibited so many stars upon which I loved to gaze with an undescribable satisfaction. (Dibdin 1836, 192–193)
The same notion of a mysterious transformation of the self through sources led collectors to the study of musical ethnography. The Enlightenment idea of a linear and evolutionary progression of music, promulgated by music historians such as Burney and Hawkins (Zon 2017, 239–241), was discarded by scholars such as Engel and Kiesewetter in favor of a view where the entirety of musical understanding of people depended on knowledge of all musical traditions, diachronically. Just as with collections of written and printed sources, a zeal for identifying the most significant ethnographical records drove scholars and collectors to deliberate over which accounts should form the basis of any understanding of global music history.
Two marked tendencies in musical learning of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the history of style, and a view of European music culture as only one of many possible cultures. Kiesewetter’s Geschichte der europäisch-abendländichen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (1834), for example, founded on his own collection, attempts to create a seamless relationship between Personstil (personal style) and the style of each era. His main argument represents an intrinsically historical perspective on music, despite outwardly focusing on individuals, as suggested by the use of subtitles such as “The Epoch of Dufay,” or “The Epoch of Ockeghem.” In detailing differences between composers within each epoch and relating them to their cultural age, Kiesewetter effectively challenged the concept of the cult of genius by highlighting contextual elements surrounding each composer. But it was precisely the detailed study of sources in private and institutional collections available to him in Vienna that propelled Kiesewetter’s new approach to the history of style. It is largely because of scholars such as Fétis and Kiesewetter that references to the “Netherlandish schools” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are still in use, and that knowledge of this school is not restricted to Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin. A considerable degree of competition between Fétis and Kiesewetter can be observed in the matters of “finding” this music and “bringing it into light,” as they themselves termed it (Alden 2010, 40–43); Susan Crane has characterized such advocacy of historical artifacts as part of a “rhetoric of waking and winning” (Crane 2000, 4–18).
What Kiesewetter and Fétis did for the “Netherlandish schools” with their publications, Giuseppi Baini (1775–1844) and Franz Haberl (1840–1910) did for Palestrina in Italy. All four scholars were fascinated by the origins of contrapuntal composition, mirroring similar preoccupations in the nineteenth century in the fields of botany and entomology—also fueled by the amassing of private collections of “data,” but in the form of fossils, insects, flowers, and seeds (Laubacher 2011). Kiesewetter’s description of his work on Dufay is striking in its terminology, which is suggestive of scientific experiment:
For the information that Dufay was born at Chymay in Hainault, and was not (as Tinctoris has asserted in his Proportionate Mus. MS 1476) a Frenchman, we have to thank M. Fétis, who proves the fact by a reference to the source from which he gained it, in his valuable memoir affixed to the Prize Essay … I have been fortunate enough to gain possession of a few very important fragments of single parts in facsimile from the works of these remarkable authors, particularly from those of Dufay, which I have succeeded in deciphering and putting into score. After the perusal of such works, it could no longer be questioned, that even before the age of Dufay, at the time when counterpoint was either never practiced at all in other countries, or introduced only in feeble and rude experiments, the Netherlands must have been the nursery of a very advanced state of art. (Kiesewetter 2013, 114–115)
This passage exemplifies many of the recurring tropes in writings by scholarly music collectors of the nineteenth century: the process of “deciphering” leads to “facts,” not interpretations. In the context of Auguste Comte’s tripartite division among the theological, metaphysical, and positive realms (or stages) of knowledge, musical history is, for these collectors and music scholars, firmly located in the latter (Comte [1844] 1995, 45–49; Karnes 2008, 9).
It may seem contradictory that the idealization of antique and forgotten books, scores, and fragments, on the one hand, and the Entfremdung from current musical culture, on the other, should have given rise to a positivistic view of historical and current music in the nineteenth century, but it is clear that the very fascination and preoccupation with obsolescence in musical form led to a deeply altered view of what nineteenth-century music meant, and ought to mean. Bibliophiles even borrowed the medieval distinction between “the inner book” (liber interior) and the “outer book” (liber exterior). In an unsigned review of Walter Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for example, whereas the latter was “the mere husk or shell—say, in four volumes—each consisting of perhaps 350 pages of Mr. Cowan’s beautiful paper, rejoicing in Messr Ballantynes’ beautiful printing,” the “inner book” represented “its immortal soul … infused with the light of setting suns, and the light of conscience of imagination, within the Sanctum Sanctorum of the student’s, the scholar’s breast” (Anon. 1827, 543).
Cultural Memory and Notions of Storage
Linked to the notion of obsolescence is the appreciation of the forgotten or the lost. Nineteenth-century librarians and scholars were aware that the preceding epoch had underestimated the worth of medieval music and related sources from around the world, and thus had a clear sense of what should be restored. Owing to an increasing familiarity with the range of sources preserved from earlier periods, the cultural ideas that might be “brought from darkness into light” could be identified effectively.2 By comparing in which historiographical contexts the sources were present or absent, collectors could also develop theories as to why some of these sources had been marginalized.
Collectors interested in musical anthropology and ethnography, as well as those involved in attempts to revitalize musical life by accessing older music, were optimistic that systematic work would eventually restore what had been lost. Engel’s hope to acquire information from all musical cultures of the world is essentially one relating to storage and retrieval. Likewise, the Cecilianism of Franz Xaver Witt (1834–1888), Proske, and others trusted that information in vast extant collections of books and notated music was passively present, ready to be accessed when needed. This sense of an achievable revitalization stemmed from the fact that many of these scholars and musicians were custodians of libraries that were more extensive than those from former periods of musical collecting. While they could no longer be familiar with every single letter, note, or sentence ever written on a specialist music topic, scholars could trust that any gaps in their knowledge were somehow present in passive form, either in their own collections or in those of their networks.
This interplay between active and passive information within an archive or library can be more clearly understood through the prism of Aleida Assmann’s concept of “cultural memory” (Assmann 2012). Cultural memory is understood not just as bipolar opposites of what is remembered, on the one hand, and what is forgotten, on the other, but also introduces a third category: a “status of latency” that is neither actively remembered nor entirely forgotten, but which is accessible in its latent form in archives and libraries, albeit only to specialists or custodians (148–150). This explains the authority and influence of music librarians such as Siegfried Dehn. When Franz Liszt heard of Pietro Raimondi’s extraordinary contrapuntal colossus Giuseppe (three oratorios that could be performed either separately or simultaneously), for example, along with his proto-polytonal fugues in more than one key, he turned not to Rome but to Berlin, expecting Dehn and other librarians and collectors to procure the score for him (Jensen 1992, 92–96).
The Paris conservatoire dictum “A library containing everything in music” (Wangermée 2008, 291) may have been the ideal for the completist scholar, but the older collecting ideals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were prolonged by elaborate discussions of “taste” and “classicism,” marking a difference between private, almost compulsive completism and the idea of the library as a monument to ideal selected works. Kiesewetter describes four different types of collectors: those interested in “the old and ancient” (here, choral polyphony is highlighted specifically); a second type who collects the best and most classical examples only; a third—the completist—wishing to amass the largest possible collection, aiming for mere “Manchfaltigkeit” (manifoldness) and “Reichtum” (richness); and a fourth type who reveres “Curiositäten” (curiosities) and “Seltenheiten” (rarities) (Kiesewetter 1834, v). Bernard Sarrette (1765–1858), the first director of the Paris Conservatoire, gave an inaugural speech for the new institution in 1796 in which he envisaged a library containing “les ouvrages des maîtres de tous les temps et toutes les nations” (the works of all masters of all ages and all nations) (Wangermée 2008, 291). An examination of the library built up at the Paris Conservatoire thereafter, however, confirms that this completist ideal was not realized in terms of acquisition policy (Massip 1996, 118). A key to understanding the acquisitions of the newly formed institutions may be found in the 1832 statutes of the Brussels Conservatoire (the year before Fétis’s appointment as director):
The library is composed of purely classical works. A duplicate of the catalogue should be kept, one of which shall be deposited in the archives of the Commission and the other in the hands of the Director. The immediate preservation of this library is entrusted to the Director of the Institution under his responsibility. The Director may not, under any circumstances, permit the departure of the establishment from the objects entrusted to his care, except in the case where the service requires it and only with the written authorization of the Commission.
(Eeckeloo 2008, 137)
The idea of a library “d’ouvrage purement classiques” (of purely classical works) is certainly connected to the normative and formative values of a good music collection, just as in early modern private collections. The utopian aim in this institution a decade later to “make available all scores from all countries from all periods” (Prod’homme 1913–14, 466) just as Sarrette envisaged in Paris, did thus not mean that every musical work or book was worthy of being included in the “pure classics” of such a library. Clearly, there was a distinction between “active” items and passive storage in these seemingly conflicting ideals. However, the same awareness of all music that existed in written or otherwise preserved form that drove completists to acquire materials also gave rise to a canonic order of what a good library ought to include. This explains derogatory remarks made by apparently completist scholars and collectors. When Dehn was faced with the opportunity to acquire Pietro Raimondi’s settings of all 150 Psalms, he did not initially succumb to curiosity surrounding Raimondi’s project, nor to the alluring completeness of the collection. Instead, he decided to analyze in some depth a dozen of the Psalm settings before confirming whether or not to acquire the entire set (Lipsius 1895–1904, 1:254–257). Similarly, when Engel complained that the British Museum music collection contained “every quadrille, ballad and polka which has been published in England during the last fifty years [1826–1876],” occupying “just as ample space as Gluck’s Alceste or Burney’s ‘History of Music,’” he highlighted an imbalance between materials that were part of active cultural memory and those that should be confined to passive storage for future completists (Engel 1876, 1:2). Ultimately, what a library might include in its collections was a matter of personal discernment. Fétis begins his instruction for organizing a library with the words: “II en est d’une bibliotheque de musique comme de toute collection scientifique ou litteraire: la meilleure est celle qui est le plus en rapport avec les gouts ou les besoins du possesseur” (It is with a music library as with all collections of science or literature: the best is that which is most in accord with the taste and requirements of the owner) (Fétis 1830b, 298).
Bestowing the status of “classical” on music was a process often associated with knowledge of larger quantities of antiquated music. Ferdinand David’s Die hohe Schule des Violinspiels, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1867, became enormously influential for violinists in the later nineteenth century. It includes some pieces that were rather obscure at the time of publication, but which became canonic by virtue of their inclusion. This music was carefully selected by David from the Privatbibliothek Seiner Majestäts des Königs von Sachsen. Once these pieces had been selected, his own cumulative input became one with the pieces. Consequently, David’s own annotated copy of the print was brought by his son Paul to the Uppingham school library, where it remained studied and annotated for generations.3
Completism and Obtainability of Sources
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the term “completist” (defined as an “obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector”) dates from a book review in the New York Times of February 6, 1955; given more recent definitions as “A collector (private, library or other) wishing a complete collection of whatever is collected” (Berger 2016, 58), its relevance to contemporary collecting patterns of books, records, and memorabilia is clear. Although the term is conspicuously absent from nineteenth-century discourses on music collecting, it is apposite in relation to the ideals of Sarrette and Fétis, as already suggested, and to those of collectors such as the English bibliographer Samuel Egerton Brydges (1762–1837), who combined a sense of the comprehensive with that of intellectual power: “When a man sits in a well-furnished library, surrounded by the collected wisdom of thousands of the best endowed minds, of various ages and countries, what an amazing extent of mental range does he command!” (Brydges 1815, 8:10. See also Ferris 2009). The concepts of power and control have been raised also by philologist Thomas Tanselle, who has identified four central aspects of collecting: the creation of order (as seen in inventories and cataloguing), a fascination with chance (as seen in the interest of rare and deviant sources); curiosity about the past, and a desire for understanding (Tanselle 1998, 14). Linked to the ideal of completeness was that of openness and the accessibility of collections. This was a complex topic, as not all of the earliest publicly funded music libraries were open to the general public, while some of the most accessible music collections of the nineteenth century were privately funded. Although the subscription and hiring facilities of the Breitkopf and Härtel and Peters libraries were significant, the accessibility that was desired stemmed from the completism and systematic zeal of musical scholarship.
The completist ideal, combined with an awareness of the cultural memory of storage, led to a disdain for handbooks and general surveys, as these books were deemed superfluous. As Engel suggested:
The most valuable literary productions are generally to be found among the investigations which are confined to a certain branch of the art. The works which pretend to embrace its whole science are often but mere compilations by writers who, like Bottom the weaver, want to act not only Pyramus, but at the same time also Thisbe and the lion. (Engel 1876, 1:154)
Kiesewetter, Fétis, Engel, and others were all deeply involved in the study of musical culture outside Europe, a logical interest given their new perspective of Western Europe not as a universal but, rather, as a singular, advanced subset of global music history (Bohlman 1986, 180). A range of documents combined to provide evidence needed in developing knowledge in this area, including sources of native local origin, explorers’ and travelers’ reports, oral mythological accounts, and notated melodies. The full title of Kiesewetter’s 1842 study of Arab music is significant: Die Musik der Araber, nach Originalquellen nachgestellt (Music of the Arabs, Presented from Original Sources). What set scholars like Kiesewetter apart from learned musicians who were not themselves collectors and bibliophiles was his focus on detailed documentary evidence rather than impressions. Through his network of scholars and collectors, Kiesewetter knew who to approach for specialist information; Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), one of the most prolific orientalist collectors in the Habsburg Empire and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the 1840s, describes how Kiesewetter consulted his extensive library:
Every Friday the honorable Mr. Kiesewetter came to me for two hours, and we read through the Arabic, Persian and Turkish works concerning music, which I, as an amateur in music, would never have understood without the theoretical guidance of Kiesewetter. (quoted in Bohlman 1986, 169–170)
In the context of such collaborative work, the bio-bibliographic projects undertaken by lone scholars such as Fétis with his Biographie universelle des musiciens, or Robert Eitner with his Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellenlexicon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (10 volumes, 1900–1904), represent Herculean undertakings. Their bibliographic feat is confirmed by the fact that much post-World War II cataloguing work (notably the collaborations between the International Association of Music Libraries and Archives and the International Musicological Society – Répertoire international des sources musicales) relied heavily on the work of these pioneers.
The Rare and the Quaint
The early nineteenth century witnessed a new enthusiasm for the “rarity” of musical items, with an interest in cast-off, damaged, misprinted, or outlandish sources that transcended any material value. Nineteenth-century auction catalogues of music describe various combinations of the “rare,” “unique,” “early,” “fine,” and “valuable,” as highlighted in the “Catalogue of a valuable and interesting collection of rare and curious books” (Christie’s, April 28, 1821), “Catalogue of the valuable collection of most esteemed music” (Sotheby, June 19, 1850), “Catalogue of the singularly peculiar & curious library of an amateur” (Sotheby and Wilkinson, July 28, 1859), and the description of a collection “consisting principally of an unique assemblage of books” (Puttick and Simpson, December 15, 1852) (Coral n.d.). Although there are connections here to the concept of a cabinet of curiosities first established in the sixteenth century, in its nineteenth-century form, this interest can be situated within an almost transcendent ideal of collecting (Impey and MacGregor 2001). Rather than simply representing another facet of the completist urge, or a fascination for the abnormal, such a focus allowed collectors the opportunity to demonstrate their evaluative or discriminatory flair in relation to unexpected objects or items.
In his essay “Curiosities in Musical Literature,” for example, Engel refers to “books … which possess but little value,” but which “deserve a place among the fanciful, paradoxical, extravagant, and quaint publications relating to the art of music” (Engel 1876, 1:165). In July 1875, auction firm Puttick and Simpson put up for sale a “Catalogue of scarce and curious books, comprising many rare but imperfect examples, useful for making up and completing other copies” (Coral n.d.). Lesser curiosities which, according to Pomian (1990, 26–33) would not have offered earlier owners any obvious cultural credibility, therefore had a higher status for nineteenth-century collectors and libraries. Likewise, Fétis addressed items of musical intrigue in his 1830 book Curiosités historiques de la musique, complément nécessaire de La Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde (Historical Curiosities in Music, a Necessary Complement to Other Music Put Within Reach of the Entire World), suggesting that nothing should be written on music that did not rest upon foundations of evidence from extant sources (Fétis 1830a, 167). Pehr Frigel’s book annotations underline similar preoccupations; on the frontispiece of Lars Högmarck’s hymnological work Psalmopoeographia (Stockholm, 1736), Frigel noted:
This book, although written in an utterly dreadful style, and containing much of what is partly ridiculous and partly superstitious, is nevertheless not altogether without value in regard to the information which it gathers in relation to our Swedish hymnology. … It is moreover extremely rare to come by and to obtain for money. (quoted in Lundberg 2010, 242)
Despite the low scholarly value of this book, Frigel establishes its appeal for collectors or library acquisitions in terms of both a completist rationale and the rarity (as an edition long out of print) and quaintness of the item.
Annotated scores of celebrated musicians and conductors represented a different type of “rarity.” These were collected and valued both for their vital information and as a last vestige of bygone masters (as in the case of Ferdinand David mentioned earlier). Julian Marshall acquired Beethoven’s sketches for the “Pastoral” Symphony, as well as the score of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 103 (“the drum roll”) with the composer’s own annotations—a document that had been given to Cherubini in 1806. Marshall pasted the entry from the earlier catalogue to an empty leaf of the score as a proof of authenticity, not unlike those guaranteeing the authenticity of a musical instrument by a master maker (Searle 1985, 75). Annotated scores owned privately and in orchestral collections (and later published in facsimile) also acted as a means of communication between different conductors and interpreters; one example is a particular score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, borrowed by Wagner from the Leipzig Concert Society in 1846, the annotations of which were later studied by others, including Mahler and Strauss (Holden 2011, 3).
Vitalization: Returning to a Pristine State of Music
While notions that books and manuscripts can provide vitalization and a return to a pristine state of the past are commonplaces of collecting and philology ever since the late Middle Ages, nineteenth-century librarianship reveals some idiosyncrasies in relation to attitudes toward the past. The philological and codicological efforts at the Abbey of Solesmes, for example, highlight clear attempts at “pristinization.” Viewing tradition as corrupt, the Benedictine monk Prosper Guéranger (1805–1875) aimed to re-establish a state prior to contemporary living traditions. This was a first principle, the “return to antiquity” (Combe 2003, 336). Similarly, the Cecilian movement in German-speaking areas attempted to reform the polyphonic music of Roman Catholic liturgy by returning to a pristine state (by rebirth). This not only involved revisions of compositional techniques and the modeling of liturgical structure in the light of historical sources, but in its more ardent forms also led to a purging of everything that authorities such as Franz Xavier Witt (1834–1888), Carl Proske (1794–1861), Kaspar Ett (1788–1847), and others deemed as nonspiritual, nonchurchly, and musically shallow. Such historical rejuvenation was intended as means to an inner sanctification of the individual in society. The desirable pristine state concerned not only the music of the church, therefore, but also the essence of the church itself, in all its social and cultural manifestations (Wagner 1969). The literary and theological learning that fueled these reforms in Regensburg and other places had a strong influence on composers within the movement itself, including Franz Nekes (1844–1914) and Peter Griesbacher (1864–1933). But it also influenced indirectly the writing of those who hesitated before those ideological and theological concerns (such as Franz Liszt), and even those who were downright opposed to the ideals, such as Joseph Rheinberger (Saffle 1988; Irmen 1970, 200–208).
That the primary propagators of a return to a pristine state of church music were ardent collectors is unsurprising, given that their motivation was underpinned by being able to point to historical ideal forms (Musterbeispiele). In relation to the ideals proposed from earlier collected music, nineteenth-century church music was seen as having gone through a Substanzverlust (loss of substance). This distinctive attempt at re-pristinization in the Roman-Catholic Society gradually converged with the craftlike academic tradition of teaching Palestrina-style counterpoint (through Fuxian species) as a tool to develop compositional technique.
The practice of sixteenth-century polyphony was designed to inculcate a more profound musicality—a trope expounded by Weinmann, who suggested that studies of Palestrina would not allow writing of an unlearned, superficial, or “unchurchly” fashion. Weinmann also believed that Proske had not merely achieved a re-pristinization but also a “Wiedergeburt” (second birth) of classical Polyphony (Weinmann 1913, 141). Thus, religious dignity was allied to compositional dignity as a bulwark against triviality and decadence, through learned studies of historical items in collections. From this perspective, it is important to understand the background of a scholar like Knud Jeppesen (1892–1974), whose systematic approach to the treatment of dissonance in Palestrina’s music can be attributed in part to his studies with Thomas Laub (1852–1927), who in turn was a protégé of Henrik Rung (1807–1871); all three Danes were ardent collectors of Renaissance music in print and manuscript. Late nineteenth-century collecting and editing also resulted in the production of quasi-facsimile book designs, imitating historical typography and orthography, as in George R. Woodward’s 1910 edition of Piae cantiones (figure 12.1), a collection of medieval music originally printed in Griefswald in 1582. Although readers might have believed this to be a facsimile edition, in reality the text, music, and critical apparatus were redesigned to archaize the contents of the original. The advocacy of music written by dead, forgotten composers, rather than their modern-day counterparts, was a controversial issue in the nineteenth century; in France, for example:
Once la musique ancienne became more than a novelty, taking concert space from living composers on a regular basis, its presence had to be justified actively. That justification—in which aesthetic judgements were frequently linked to notions of the regeneration, purification, or popularization of culture—necessarily brought with it the implication that certain modern traditions were decadent, elitist, and impure. (Ellis 2005, xviii)
Figure 12.1 George R. Woodward, ed., Piae Cantiones (1910), xxv
An insistence by nineteenth-century collectors and librarians on the unique value of forgotten and obsolete music from the “storage” of large music collections therefore formed the basis for the breadth of modern concert life.
Conclusion
The acts of collecting, cataloguing, and other aspects of archival work and librarianship were at the heart of proto-musicological and musicological work in the nineteenth century. Without such fervent activities as those outlined here we would not have the complete scholarly editions of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and others, which grew directly out of the collecting culture of scholars like Kiesewetter, Fuchs, Nottebohm, and Chrysander. Nor would we have the bibliographical work of Fétis, Hofmeister, and Eitner, or the systematic full-text publication of medieval music treatises by Coussemaker. Collecting practices also enabled a historiographical understanding of the importance of revisiting earlier points of music history, and of exploring alternative musical cultures to those of Western Europeans. The collecting culture of the nineteenth century represents a bifurcation of tradition and re-pristinization—the choice between cumulatively prolonging and developing what was inherited from the previous generation and attempting to return to prior idealized states.
With the tension between completism and “a library containing all music from all periods and all nations,” on the one hand, and one “consisting solely of classical works” or “works in pristine states,” on the other, one can understand how active and passive knowledge and understanding of music were deeply rooted in librarianship and scholarship of the nineteenth century. Just as we can appreciate the Romantic longing for the ineffable, lost, or unachievable, so the fascination with unseen or unheard music led collectors to pursue interests far removed from the familiar paths within historiography, ethnography, and music philology. It is clear that the sense of longing (Sehnsucht) relating to love lost or childhood’s disappearing memories and other topoi in Romantic poetry and novels was reflected in the longing for music that was lost or disappearing, and the dream of holding it in one’s hands in the form of a sheet or bound volume.