The most neglected aspect in our study of the life of the musical artwork is the publisher. We may know detailed information about the genesis of a piece, yet we are unable to answer basic questions about how that work was disseminated in print: Who was the publisher? What was his relationship with the composer? How many copies of a given piece were published, how often, over how many years? What were the financial arrangements for individual publications? These questions remain largely unanswered even for such studied composers as Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner. According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the neglect resides in “the ideology of creation, which makes the author the first and last source of the value of his work.” 1 This ideology has made us unwilling to assign credit to the business of culture.
Liszt’s oeuvre has suffered from this same bias: no comprehensive study of the role of his music publishers has been undertaken. 2 This essay will help fill the lacuna by closely studying and analyzing for the first time the activities of one publisher, Friedrich Hofmeister in Leipzig, on Liszt’s behalf. The basis for these considerations is the discovery of complete print-run statistics for Liszt works published by Hofmeister, as well as a series of unpublished letters between Liszt and the firm, and the balance sheet for the Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (LW A22). 3 These important business records have only now come to light because the Hofmeister archive remained in tight private possession until 1952, and after the expropriation of the company by the GDR, the records were relegated to the relatively inaccessible state archive in Leipzig. 4 The print-run figures are valuable for their contribution to our knowledge about individual Liszt works, but they gain in importance because of the comparisons they permit with other Hofmeister publications of the period, especially those by composers like Schumann and Chopin. Hofmeister’s firm was only one member in a complicated international web of music publishers that made the same works of Liszt available to the purchasing public across national boundaries, yet broader comparisons are not possible since the business records of those other companies no longer exist or are inaccessible. 5 Still, study of the statistics and the other documents, in comparison with materials from the Schlesinger archive maintained by Musikverlag Zimmermann in Frankfurt am Main, and the C. F. Peters archive at the state archive in Leipzig, gives a clearer picture of early Liszt publishing practices and provide new insights into German music publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century. Above all, these new sources allow us to explore the nexus between composer, publisher, and public. Hofmeister was inventing nothing less than a technology of popularity: he created collectors among the public by publishing the works that Liszt so successfully performed for them.
Let us first take a brief look at the publisher. 6 Friedrich Hofmeister, born in 1782, opened his music shop in Leipzig on 19 March 1807. Within a year, he started publishing music, largely songs and piano music by composers like Henri Cramer and Friedrich Wieck. In the following years, the publisher on the one hand risked investing in works by Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, and Heinrich Marschner, and on the other maintained a catalogue of popular and pedagogical music that would sell large numbers of copies. (Table 1 , following this essay, presents the print-run statistics for various works by Beethoven.) During the same period, the guitar method of J. T. Lehmann, to take an example of a more popular publication, appeared in printings of 1,000 copies each. Hofmeister’s choice of composers eventually covered the full range, from relatively unknown, young, “serious” figures like Chopin and Schumann through celebrated popular ones like Joseph Labitzky (1802–81) and Norbert Burgmüller (1810–36). After 1847, Hofmeister gradually yielded control to his sons Adolph Moritz (1802–70) and Wilhelm (1824–77). As of 1852, composers had to deal solely with the two sons, who continued their father’s policies and commitments, and new catalogue items were largely popular in nature. The firm had various owners in the twentieth century, was expropriated by the GDR, opened a branch in Frankfurt, and still exists in Leipzig today.
There is no documentation for Liszt’s earliest contact with Hofmeister, which must predate his publication of Die Rose (LW A17, composed 1833), Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (A18, 1833–34) and Apparitions (A19, 1834) in November of 1835. It remains unclear how or why Liszt settled on Hofmeister as his primary German publisher, which Hofmeister would remain for the next five years; it stands to reason, however, that Liszt would be associated with a leading German music publisher, who at the time seems to have enjoyed good ties with Liszt’s Parisian friend, music publisher Maurice Schlesinger. The following list presents the works of Liszt that Hofmeister published, identified here by the title given in the publisher’s handwritten Druckverzeichnisse.
Liszt by and large remained faithful to Hofmeister in the second half of the 1830s. In a letter from 5 April 1838, he acknowledged Hofmeister’s activity on his behalf: “Up to the present I have had none but the most pleasant business relations with Herr Hofmeister, who has the kindness to publish the greater part of my works in Germany.” 7 However, an incident in 1839 soured the relationship: according to a Liszt letter from 1855, Hofmeister pirated the 1826 French edition of the twelve etudes, a version that Liszt himself had previously renounced. 8 In the following year Hofmeister published the Réminiscences de Lucia (LW A22) and in 1852 the organ version of Nicolai’s Kirchliche Fest-ouvertüre (LW E2). 9 However, Liszt would turn to other German publishers during the 1840s and afterward. 10
In his later business dealings, Liszt sent the publishing firm a letter in 1869 that criticized the company’s continuing interest in his virtuoso-era works. 11 This unpublished letter answers the firm’s request for renewed German publication rights for three works: the Grand Galop chromatique (LW A43), which Liszt calls “aged”; the Réminiscences de Lucia (LW A22), which he calls “worn out”; and the Hugenotten Fantasie (Grande fantaisie sur des thèmes de l’opéra Les Huguenots) (LW A35), which he dismisses as “a thankless piece with very little success.” 12 While Liszt gave permission for the first two pieces, he could not do the same for the third because of “the differences that occurred years ago between your house and that of Schlesinger in Berlin, which resulted in legal proceedings.” 13 Although the disagreement originally concerned the question of which publisher had the rights over the Huguenots fantasy, Heinrich Schlesinger actually took Hofmeister to court in 1843 over a defamatory statement that the latter had published in 1842 in the Allgemeines Buchhändler-Börsenblatt , and Liszt, at Hofmeister’s insistence, was forced to give a deposition in court against Schlesinger, who was a friend. 14 The court case may well have been another factor behind his leaving Hofmeister.
The dispute itself is of interest as an example of the close relationship between publishing and performance. Heinrich Schlesinger in Berlin asserted that his brother Maurice in Paris, who had purchased “toute la propriété” for the Huguenots Fantasy from Liszt, had ceded him the German publication rights for the work in 1837. In the words of Heinrich Schlesinger: “Since the compositions of Mr. Liszt had only a small number of sales in Germany at the time, and this fantasy—because of its colossal technical difficulties—promised even fewer sales, we had a few copies printed for us in Paris…. When we saw Mr. Hofmeister’s edition, we demanded in writing on 9 January 1838 that he suppress his [edition] as an illegal one. Since the item appeared to us to be of so little commercial value, we did not pursue taking him to court…. [However,] Mr. Liszt’s presence in Berlin [in the winter and spring of 1841–42] and the roaring applause that the Fantasy on Motives from the Huguenots received caused us—with approval of the composer—to proceed with the engraving of the plates and a new cover.” 15 In other words, publishing the piece by Liszt became important to Schlesinger by virtue of the composer’s and music’s acquired popularity.
In sorting out the composer-publisher relationship between Liszt and Hofmeister, it is clear that Liszt’s personal ties to Hofmeister were limited. Outside the five years between 1835 and 1840, during which Hofmeister published Liszt’s new works, there is virtually no correspondence between them, and references in other letters are quite few. One reason is to be found in Liszt’s desire, after retiring from his virtuoso career in 1847, to distance himself from his virtuosic works, which he associated with the Hofmeister years. The problems in this relationship may also be attributable to Hofmeister’s personality, which was difficult, as reflected in his dealings with other composers like Marschner and Schumann: he was cold and calculating, cheap, and even dishonest, traits that were not a good basis for a long-term relationship or friendship with Liszt. 16 Hofmeister’s sons do not seem to have shared his difficult personality, but as Liszt’s letter from 1869 implies, the father’s retirement did not remove his problems over the company’s actions in the past. 17
Regardless of the firm’s relationship with its composers, the new documents from the Hofmeister archive reveal how extensively the company published during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its period of greatest activity. The print indexes (Druckverzeichnisse) record dates of publication and print runs for over 10,000 pieces of printed music between 1808 and 1930. At least nineteen of those plate numbers are for works by Liszt. The indices also preserve some balance sheets for individual pieces, but only one for a work by Liszt, Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor of 1840 (LW A22). 18 In total, Hofmeister printed almost 50,000 copies of pieces by Liszt between 1835 and 1930. While the new statistics help us identify some unknown first editions, my interest here is what these figures reveal to us about Hofmeister’s contributions to the popularity of individual works by Liszt, compared among themselves and with the works of other composers. But I should note that my findings are only valid for Germany, due to international laws at the time that limited individual publisher’s activities to their own countries. A complicated network of international agents meant that a given work by Liszt could hypothetically appear in five approved European editions at once or in close proximity (Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy). 19 More often, three “national” editions of Liszt’s works were published simultaneously through international agreements, such as the Réminiscences de Lucia , which appeared in 1840 in an authorized edition under the imprints of Latte in Paris, Hofmeister in Leipzig, and Ricordi in Milan. With regard to Liszt’s piano music, the configuration of international publishers was not always the same, and thus for Paris of the late 1830s and early 1840s, music publishers Brandus, Latte, Schlesinger (Paris), and Troupenas all appear in his definitive works list, in varying conjunction with Hofmeister, Schott, Schlesinger (Berlin), Schuberth, and Breitkopf & Härtel in Germany, and Diabelli, Spina, Haslinger, and Mechetti in Austria. 20 While compositions like the first version of the transcriptions of Beethoven Symphony nos. 5 and 6 (LW A37b) and of the Symphony no. 7 (LW A37b) enjoyed exclusive publishing arrangements with Breitkopf & Härtel and Haslinger respectively, it was to the composer’s advantage to have his music disseminated as widely as possible. It is no coincidence that the music Liszt featured on tours between 1838 and 1847 was most significantly represented in multiple international editions, a point to which we shall return.
The three publications of 1835, all printed on 17 November, do not suggest the work of a popular or even promising composer, neither by print runs nor by the company’s modest advertisement in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. 21 First printings of 100 copies were standard for a relatively unknown composer, which Liszt was in Germany in 1835. The diminishing publication activity for all three pieces (table 2 ) bespeak the unsuitability of these early works as repertory for the concerts of Liszt’s virtuoso tours, beginning in 1838. 22 This is especially evident in the case of the Apparitions (LW A19), which appeared in only 100 copies between 1839 and 1855, quite a contrast with the 500-plus annual print runs for the popular virtuosic pieces. In establishing the relative value of “esoteric” early works like the Apparitions and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (LW A18), we may well marvel over their harmonic and formal audacities, yet it is just those experimental qualities that set them apart from Hofmeister’s cash cows like the etudes of Adolph Henselt or dance music for piano by Charles Mayer. 23 Such evidence supports the contention that marketability (thus popularity), and not aesthetic considerations drove the diffusion of the music by publishers, and thus Hofmeister can be justified for printing so few copies of these seminal early piano works. While aesthetic factors might well have contributed to the public’s preference for certain pieces, the publisher’s judgment of the music had business as its primary concern, as we shall see. These editions also indirectly provide the first proof of a link between Liszt’s extraordinary virtuosic performances and sales of his music, since he did not perform the works on the road and they did not sell well. This may beg the question of whether the lack of popular success for these three pieces motivated Liszt not to perform them, or whether his failure to program them obviated any appreciation from the public that could buy the sheet music. But the fact remains that Liszt did not play the works in public and the music did not sell.
Ultimately, the difficulty of a piece by Liszt—the issue of playability—did not hinder its sales, since the Hofmeister figures reveal that people bought sheet music they could not possibly play because they had seen and heard Liszt perform it, whereby the notes on the page served as a souvenir of that “transcendental” experience. At the same time, a piece of music was not assured of popularity just because it was a difficult, flashy operatic fantasy. The Réminiscences de la Juive (LW A20) is a good case in point: Hofmeister’s German edition never made it beyond 800 copies during the nineteenth century (table 3 ). Before the tours (1838–47) this edition had already experienced a precipitous decline in numbers, from 250 copies in the first year 1836–37, to 100 in the second year, to 50 in the next four years. Liszt himself did not program the work in Germany, both a cause and effect of its lack of popularity.
Before addressing the question of why the Réminiscences de la Juive did not work well in print or in concert, we must consider the general realm of operatic paraphrases, fantasies, etc.—compositions that should have proven more accessible to the general public and thus more “popular” than newly composed works like the Apparitions (LW A19) or the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (LW A18), or even a Schubert arrangement like Die Rose (LW A17). As Charles Suttoni observes, “It was the public’s familiarity with these [opera] melodies that drew them both to the opera house and the concert hall”—and, I would add, to the music store. 24 Timeliness was an important goal for the production of paraphrases, since they had to appear either while the work was still onstage or while its melodies remained in the public’s memory. Indeed, Liszt completed his fantasies normally at least within one year of the opera’s premiere. While those reminiscences and fantasies Liszt published with Hofmeister represented widely performed operatic scenes and arias, commentators like Suttoni and Leslie Howard place them within an early phase, as compared with the post-1840 reminiscences on Robert le diable, Norma , and Don Juan. 25 They suggest that the early transcriptions tend to be overly long and their virtuosic effects obscure the originating melodies, which would have weakened the attraction for the public. (It should be noted, however, that the assessment of a progression in Liszt’s style during the period in question is not uncontested and merits a fuller study.) Perhaps because performance records indicate that Halévy’s La Juive was much performed and greatly appreciated in Germany as Die Jüdin , Liszt’s reminiscences may well have missed their audience despite a certain virtuosic appeal. 26 Thus it is not until measure 131 that a complete theme from the opera appears, and much of the work is freely conceived as a showpiece, with Halévy’s “delicately exotic” Boléro—the terms are Suttoni’s—getting lost in the fray. Still, the opera was popular and Liszt was beginning to enjoy fame, so the novelty of the work ensured a limited initial sales interest.
Encouraged by the preliminary success of the Réminiscences de La Juive (LW A20), and by the overall balance sheet of Liszt sales (750 copies in the first fourteen months of Liszt publication), Hofmeister took the important step of increasing the initial print run for the next Liszt piece, the Grande Valse di bravura (LW A32a), to 150, a number that would become standard for Liszt works (table 4 ). Since the first Hofmeister publications in 1835, Liszt had begun concertizing extensively to great acclaim, especially from the spring of 1838 on, and thus the publisher had every reason to believe he was backing a “winner.” However, it is not coincidental that Liszt programmed the waltz moderately in Germany, that the publication sold only moderately in that market, and that once he ceased playing it in Germany, in 1842, it stopped selling. Neither his correspondence nor the music itself inform us why Liszt did not widely perform the piece, which Howard calls “flamboyant and witty.” 27 The same scenario essentially holds true for the Grande fantaisie sur des motifs de Niobe (Divertissement sur la cavatine de Pacini “I tuoi frequenti palpiti”) (LW A24), with 150 as the initial print run (figure 1 ). It also sold 250 copies within its first year beginning in February 1837, before the tours in Germany (table 5 ). After 1838, Hofmeister printed only 50 copies of the Grande fantaisie per year (1840, 1841, 1842, and 1845). Pacini’s popular cavatina was the best-known number from his 1826 opera, which survived into the 1830s and later in a variety of variation and fantasy elaborations by such composers as Franz Hünten, Heinrich Panofka, and Joseph Dessauer. 28
Beginning in early 1838, Hofmeister and Liszt entered the world of mass publishing with three major virtuoso piano works that would be popular during the German tours and would sell in great numbers during the nineteenth century, thus increasing the publisher’s reputation and earning substantial profits. The fantasy on Les Huguenots (first version, LW A35), the reminiscences of Lucia (LW A22), and the Grand Galop chromatique (LW A43)—coincidentally, the major pieces on Liszt’s first public concert in Germany, in Dresden on 16 March 1840—sold over 37,000 copies in Hofmeister’s German editions before 1930. At the same time, the Huguenots fantasy (figure 2 ) did not significantly depart from the publication pattern of the Niobe fantasy, although it ultimately sold more copies (1,725 in all; see table 6 ). Hofmeister printed 300 copies in 1838 (initial print run of 150), followed by 50 or 100 copies per year through 1843, then 50 in 1846 and in 1848, and no further printings until 1854. Liszt’s later assessment of the work’s internal problems helps to explain the unusual discrepancy between his own active promotion of it in Germany and its modest sales in that market during the tours. 29 The inordinate length of the first version of the Huguenots fantasy—over twenty minutes—probably also influenced subsequent performance and sales. Of course, once Schlesinger in Berlin published a significantly shortened, revised version in 1842, demand for the first version would have diminished. Largely based on the love duet between Valentine and Raoul at the end of Act 4, with other thematic material surrounding it, Liszt’s fantasy (original version) presents a different, more coherent, and organic concept of the work than other paraphrases, including the Huguenots fantasy by Sigismond Thalberg, which in traditional potpourri fashion presents three high points from the opera, each elaborated in succession. 30 If Liszt’s work receives higher praise today on the basis of aesthetic considerations, the Thalberg composition may have found more eager listeners in its day. The German concert-going public not only was accustomed to hearing the type of paraphrase promulgated by Thalberg, but would also have found the potpourri style more readily accessible. 31 While Liszt’s paraphrases from the 1840s—created specifically for performance on tour—continued this level of sophistication, tending to focus on a single character, they were swept up in the “Lisztomania” of the times, with audiences eager to hear his latest creations on their favorite operas.
Figure 1. Hofmeister edition, Grande fantaisie sur des motifs de Niobe / Divertissement sur la cavatine de Pacini (“I tuoi frequenti palpiti”) .
Figure 2. Hofmeister edition, Réminiscences des Huguenots.
The publication life of the Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (LW A22) anticipates and reflects this direction. Hofmeister first released it in early 1840, when Liszt was already embarking upon his German tours, and thus Hofmeister must have felt justified issuing it in the unusually high initial print run of 300 copies, followed two weeks later by another 200 (table 7 ). While print runs and frequencies of publication lag behind those for the Grand Galop chromatique (discussed below), the figures for Lucia nevertheless reveal a sensation. We are fortunate that for the Lucia fantasy, the Hofmeister records preserve a balance sheet for the first four years of publication (figure 3 ). For the first time, we can observe a publisher’s expenses and income for a major virtuosic piece by Liszt. Figure 4 presents the details. For our purposes, it is less important to know the taler’s absolute value than the relative issues of cost and profit (although it should be noted that the music for the Niobe fantasy, for example, cost 1 taler). Hofmeister made twice as much money on the first four years of the Lucia fantasy than he spent on it. He did this because he sold copies for twice what it cost him to produce them, and his other expenditures were minimal. 32 Liszt’s honorarium, for example, was 40 talers—Hofmeister needed to sell less than 80 copies of Liszt’s piece at 14 groschen each to cover Liszt’s honorarium, and within the first three months he had already sold 500. 33 In all, the firm printed nearly 15,000 copies of the piece, a remarkable number by nineteenth-century standards. Obviously, publishing Liszt was a profitable business, but more important, we again observe how publisher and public lived in a symbiotic relationship: Hofmeister both responded to and created the Lisztomania of the day through the popularizing technology of publishing.
Figure 3. Hofmeister balance sheet detail for Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor , 1840–43.
Figure 4. Hofmeister Druckverzeichnis print-run detail for Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor , 1840–43.
The most successful of the Hofmeister publications of Liszt was the Grand Galop chromatique (LW A43), which became Liszt’s signature piece in Germany and sold over 20,000 copies total in Hofmeister’s two- and four-hand editions. After an initial print run of 150 copies on 9 March 1838 (table 8 ), two more printings of 100 each within the first year, and a modest run of 200 during 1839, sales of the German edition took off once Liszt began the tours. Here the correlation between performance and publishing is clear: 950 copies the first tour year; 600 in 1841; 1,400 in 1842; and 1,100 in 1843, with the number trailing off to 300 in 1844, the year in which he performed in Germany only through March. This amounts to 3,550 copies within six years, more than Hofmeister printed for the entire oeuvre of Chopin. During the course of the century, a normal decay of sales occurred, but for an ephemeral piece, Grand Galop proved unusually resilient, enjoying a reprint of 600 copies every two to three years. Not only is the frequency of printings during the early 1840s remarkable (every one to three months), but the size of print runs is also unusual for a Hofmeister publication of piano music: 100 copies, then 200 copies, and starting with 1843, 300 copies at a time. Such large numbers were a risk for the publisher, and the cautious Hofmeister expanded the print runs only when he could ensure sustaining high sales levels.
As a piece of salon dance music, the galop brings us more squarely into the realm of the domestic than either the free compositions or the works based on other compositions. Unlike those pieces, the galop was also functional music, which gave the sheet music a certain usefulness for the socially climbing middle class of the time. 34 If we were to remark that the sheet music to Liszt’s Grand Galop chromatique could have attained popularity because it was functional music of lesser difficulty than the composer’s other tour music, it must be noted that the issue of technical demands is relative. While the question of the technical capabilities of musicians of the day—amateur and professional—has yet to receive scholarly attention, this music is of a difficulty not to be compared with that for galops by other Hofmeister composers like Panofka or Burgmüller, especially when played at Liszt’s tempo: “The tempo of the dance was so fast that one could hardly follow it with the ear, and even less with the eye, for whoever looked at the fingers of the concert-giver got lost in their rapidity.” 35 Liszt customarily played the Grand Galop chromatique at the end of a virtuoso concert, as a “rouser,” suggesting that purchasers were bringing Liszt’s transcendence—and possibly a remembrance of his performance—into their residences when they bought this “functional” music. While it has been popular in Liszt scholarship to dismiss crowd-pleasing works like the Grand Galop , the new Hofmeister statistics give concrete evidence of how Liszt became a household word—or household item—through such popular music. As Charles Rosen notes, “Only a view of Liszt that places [pieces like] the Second Hungarian Rhapsody in the center of his work will do him justice.” 36
The Hofmeister statistics for Liszt’s virtuosic works take on greater significance when used for comparison. While the same data for other Liszt publishers is at best incomplete, we know that Breitkopf & Härtel intended to publish a group of six symphonic poems in an initial print run of 150 copies. The firm explained to the composer in May of 1856 that the number represents “the minimum required to disseminate the work to any extent among the public and at the same time to place at your disposal adequate copies.” 37 Of course, the general public would not be the primary consumers of the scores, which are a far cry from the piano sheet music from the late 1830s and the ’40s. 38 Later in the century, Liszt’s piano music continued its earlier high flight, as evidenced by print-run statistics from C. F. Peters. 39 The Rigoletto: Paraphrase de concert (LW A187) of circa 1855 appeared in Peters’s German edition of March 1891 in an initial printing of 1,000 copies, with another 2,500 copies printed over the next three years. The Miserere du Trovatore (LW A199) was issued in January 1893 with 1,000 copies and with 500 more in both 1895 and 1897.
The Hofmeister figures also allow us to compare his promotion of Liszt with that for other composers, with revealing results. We might expect that composers like Schumann or Chopin were important market items for Hofmeister, but then we would be assuming that aesthetic considerations—or worse yet, our own construction of the canon—drove the dissemination of music. Actually, the most successful composers for Hofmeister were concert virtuosi like Liszt, Henselt, and Mayer, while Schumann and Chopin did not do well for the publisher, at least not initially.
Let us take a look at Schumann’s Intermezzo, op. 4, and Toccata, op. 7, two of the most important Schumann pieces in the Hofmeister catalogue, albeit relatively minor works within the composer’s oeuvre. The works clearly did not meet the publisher’s expectations at first, for after an initial printing of 100 copies each in, respectively, 1833 and 1834 (tables 9 and 10 ), they did not again reach that same print-run level for another thirty years. In fact, during Schumann’s lifetime, Hofmeister printed only 175 and 300 copies of these pieces, quite a striking contrast with his publication of Liszt. Interestingly, both of the Schumann works significantly increased in sales during the 1860s, which corresponds with the increased touring activity of Clara on behalf of her deceased husband—again, proof of the link between performance and publication. These increases after a substantial amount of time defy the trend, seen with Liszt and other composers, of a consistent decline in sales. In the case of Schumann and Chopin, the eventual canonization of the composer led to heightened interest in these and other works, while more popular music, including Liszt’s Grand Galop , lost their appeal over time. Chopin’s Impromptu, op. 51 (table 11 ) increased in sales only well after the first printing and after the composer’s death, perhaps in connection with Liszt’s promotion of Chopin through his book, which found wide distribution in Germany.
When comparing Liszt’s publication status with that of other composers, it becomes apparent that the same nexus of performance and publication is in operation. Two unpublished letters from Heinrich Schlesinger reflect how important that relationship was for publishers. In a letter to his brother Maurice in Paris dating from 1844, Heinrich remarked that he “would take [Theodor] Döhler’s Gr. Fantaisie de Concert sur la Favorita de Donizetti p. Piano for an honorarium of 800 Fr., if Döhler performs it in concerts.” 40 He makes the point even more forcefully when writing about Jacques Rosenhain’s fantasy on Halévy’s La Reine de Chypre for piano: “I will take [it] for 300 Fl. only if Rosenhain plays it in concerts, otherwise not.” 41 In the case of these composers, however, the publisher was able to dictate his terms, which would not have been the case with Liszt in the early 1840s. In a letter from 1838, Liszt himself recognized the value of performances for the publication of his Hexaméron: “In any case [it] will not really be published until I perform it in Paris. For some years this will be the inevitable misfortune of all the pieces I write.” 42
Looking ahead into the later nineteenth century, the composer’s renown or canonic status would overtake live performance as a driver of popularity in the publication of piano music. As the phenomenon of virtuosity lost its most outstanding proponent in 1847, as the critique of the practice mounted, and as the spirit of the age shifted from optimism to pessimism, the need for the entertaining, popular performance of the virtuoso fell away. Certainly neither Brahms nor Grieg, to mention two pianist-composers after 1850, needed or used the vehicle of public performance to sell their sheet music, which did quite well according to the records of C. F. Peters. And an established figure like Mendelssohn dominated the market in initial and subsequent printings by virtue of his canonic stature. 43
So, did Hofmeister miss the boat by using the popularizing technology of the press to promote Liszt’s Grand Galop over his Harmonies poétiques , Schumann’s Intermezzo, or Chopin’s Impromptu? We must say no, for if a publisher made it his task to discover genius, he would not have been in business for long. In fact, Hofmeister could only afford to publish Schumann, Chopin, Alkan (and even the more esoteric works of Liszt) on the backs of Liszt, Lehmann, Henselt, and Mayer. Publishing and audience demand went hand-in-hand—we may not be able to say that Hofmeister made Liszt, but he certainly helped make the sensation around Liszt. Yet we must also give Hofmeister credit for taking a risk with such patently unpopular works as the Harmonies poétiques and Apparitions.
Of the many questions that remain, one is of particular interest: Why were “Lisztomaniacs” purchasing in great numbers pieces that were beyond their technical capabilities? The prevailing assumption has been that piano music of the ninetheenth century was bought to be performed. However, in light of the tremendous sales figures for Liszt’s virtuoso music in connection with such a momentous historical occurrence as his virtuoso tours throughout Europe and the resulting Lisztomania, we are invited to rethink the reasons behind those purchases. As Walter Benjamin helps us theorize, this was an issue of collecting and empowerment. 44 In a seminal article from 1986, Beverly Gordon argues that the physical presence of the souvenir “brings back into ordinary experience something of the quality of an extraordinary experience.” 45 If certain possessions can also be considered to be functions of an “extended self,” thus creating meaning in life for subjects, then we could posit that owning one of Liszt’s latest virtuoso hits was the result of desires both to possess an artifact inscribed with his transcendent power and to participate vicariously in the Lisztomania of the times. 46
As shown through the correlation between performance and publishing, the individual would purchase Liszt pieces that he or she had heard in concert or that were prominently featured in the Liszt craze (“You just have to get this…”). The publisher satisfied the urges of the emerging bourgeoisie to gather artifacts for the purpose of memory, empowerment, and self-transcendence at a difficult time, when the bourgeoisie was seeking identity and stability in the midst of social and economic turmoil. He was ultimately creating collectors of cultural goods, who could find at least temporary liberation in published music. Sheet music was only part of this material culture—publishers were quick to toss off large numbers of lithographs and biographical pamphlets during and after Liszt’s visits. 47 Here we see how, by catering to popular taste, the publisher was meeting important human needs of his times.
The tables below are derived from Hofmeister’s three printed volumes of print indexes (Druckverzeichnisse). In addition to the month/year and raw figure for each print run we have also provided a graphic interpretation of each work’s printing history. Below the graph we have listed, variously, the catalogue number, title and composer, instrumentation, work or opus number, number of plates, designer of the cover page, and other printing information as presented in the original entries of the Druckverzeichnisse.
Source: Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister, Druckverzeichnisse, 43–45
Various colleagues and institutions have significantly contributed to this essay. First and foremost I must thank the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig and their employees, who not only made the Hofmeister materials accessible, but also enabled and approved reproduction of the sources. Herr Norbert Molkenburg of C. F. Peters Verlag kindly allowed me to work with items from the Peters archive maintained within the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada for providing funding for my research in Leipzig. Jim Samson, Jeff Kallberg, Sanna Pederson, and Michael Saffle have all contributed valuable insights into the topic. Finally, I thank Christopher Gibbs and Dana Gooley for their careful editing of and helpful comments on drafts of this essay.
1. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production , ed. Randal Johnson (New York: 1993), p. 76.
2. One of the reasons for this lacuna is the complexity of Liszt’s publishing history, in terms of his substantial oeuvre, the large number of publishers he used, and his practice of extensively revising and reissuing works. The best overview of his publishing activities is furnished in Albi Rosenthal’s “Franz Liszt and His Publishers,” Liszt Saeculum 38 (1986): 3–40.
3. The Liszt numbers (LW) are taken from the works list prepared by Rena Charnin Mueller and Mária Eckhardt for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2nd ed., vol. 14 (London: 2001), pp. 786–872. According to this system, piano works are prefaced by the designation A .
4. While the state archive system of the GDR maintained quite restrictive access policies, the complete holdings of the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig have been open to the general public since 1989.
5. Within Germany, there exists no trace of an archive for Schuberth, while only the Briefkopierbücher and first editions survive in a closed archive for Liszt’s Berlin publisher Schlesinger. B. Schott’s Söhne in Mainz and Breitkopf & Härtel were two important German publishers of Liszt’s music, yet their archives—which by and large survived the Second World War—are largely inaccessible to scholars today because these holdings remain in the hands of the companies. Ricordi in Milan, responsible for Liszt publishing in Italy, does not possess the needed print-run statistics (although they do preserve valuable Liszt autographs). And documents from Liszt’s primary Austrian publisher, Haslinger, seem to have disappeared altogether (they may be in private possession, as a collection).
6. Biographical information about Friedrich Hofmeister and historical details about his company appear most fully in the publication Tradition und Gegenwart: Festschrift zum 150jährigen Bestehen des Musikverlages Friedrich Hofmeister (Leipzig: 1957).
7. “Ich habe bis zu dieser Stunde nur die trefflichsten Beziehungen zu Herrn Hofmeister gehabt, der die Güte hat, den gröβten Teil meiner Werke in Deutschland zu veröffentlichen.” Letter from Liszt to Breitkopf & Härtel, 5 April 1838; repr. in Oskar von Hase, Breitkopf & Härtel: Gedenkschrift , 4th ed., vol. 2 (Leipzig: 1919), p. 146.
8. “Hofmeister’s printing of the twelve etudes…is simply a reprint of the volume of etudes that was published in France when I was in my thirteenth year. I have long disavowed this edition and…replaced it by the second [edition]…. As a result, I regard the [Breitkopf &] Härtel edition of the twelve etudes as the only legal one.” “Die Hofmeister’sche Auflage der 12 Etuden…ist einfach ein Nachdruck des Heftes Etuden, welches, als ich in meinem 13ten Jahr war, in Frankreich veröffentlicht wurde. Ich habe diese Ausgabe längst desavouirt und durch die zweite…ersetzt…. Folglich erkenne ich blos die Härtel’sche Ausgabe der 12 Etuden als die einzig rechtmässige .” Letter from Liszt to Alfred Dörffel, 17 January 1855, in Briefe , ed. La Mara, vol. 1 (Leipzig: 1893), p. 189.
9. The Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig preserves Liszt’s unpublished contract with Hofmeister for this piece, under the call number Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister, 5/1.
10. Liszt had also been publishing with Schott in Mainz since the mid-1830s and continued with them into the 1840s, while after 1840 he had Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, Schuberth in Hamburg and Leipzig, Schlesinger in Berlin, and Cranz in Leipzig as his major German publishers, with Kistner in Leipzig joining them after 1848.
11. Unpublished letter from Liszt to Hofmeister (Jr.), from Rome, 16 September 1869; Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister, 5/2.
12. “Der greisen ‘Galop chromatique’… , der abgenützten ‘Reminiscences de Lucia’ …der Hugenotten Fantasie ,— ein undankbares Stück, von sehr geringen [sic] Erfolg.”
13. “Die vor vielen Jahren stattgefundenen Differenzen zwischen ihrem [sic] Verlag und den [sic] Schlesinger’schen in Berlin, worauf gerichtliche Verhandlungen erfolgten.”
14. Friedrich Hofmeister, “Die Schlesinger’sche Musikalienhandlung in Berlin,” Allgemeines Buchhändler-Börsenblatt 9, no. 50 (12 December 1842): 393–94.
15. “Da damals die Compositionen des Herrn Liszt nur geringen Absatz in Deutschland hatten, diese Fantaisie ihrer colossalen Schwierigkeiten wegen, noch weniger Absatz versprach, so liessen wir in Paris eine Anzahl Exemplare für uns drucken…. Als uns Herrn Hofmeister’s Ausgabe zu Gesicht kam, fordertern wir ihn schriftlich den 9. Januar 1838 auf, dieselbe als eine widerrechtliche zu unterdrücken; und da der Gegenstand uns in Bezug auf commerziellen Vortheil zu unbedeutend schien, so unterliessen wir die Ausstellung eines Processes…. Herrn Liszts Anwesenheit in Berlin und der rauschende Beifall, den die Fantasie über Motive aus den Hugenotten sich erwarb, veranlassten uns mit Genehmigung des Componisten den Stich der Notenplatten und eines neuen Umschlagtitels zu veranlassen.” Paste-in of corrected version of article from the Allgemeines Buchhändler-Börsenblatt of May 1842, from Berlin, 26 May 1842; Frankfurt am Main, Archiv des Musikverlags Zimmermann, Briefkopierbuch.
16. Tradition und Gegenwart , pp. 23–25.
17. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
18. The balance sheets bound in Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister, Druckverzeichnisse, 43, contain details about all expenditures and income for a given work, including on the one side the composer’s honorarium, engraving costs, and printing costs, on the other sales revenues. Unfortunately, the balance sheets only exist for works published between 1840 and 1845, which excludes Liszt’s earlier publications with Hofmeister.
19. Axel Beer discusses these networks in his authoritative study Musik zwischen Komponist, Verlag und Publikum: Die Rahmenbedingungen des Musikschaffens in Deutschland im ersten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing: 2000), p. 66.
20. Ricordi in Milan was the only Italian publisher for Liszt’s piano compositions before 1848, whereas for the small number of those works that appeared in Britain (less than ten), Liszt had at least five publishers: Boosey, Wessel, Mori & Lavenu, Cocks, and Cramer, Addison & Beale.
21. Fr. Hofmeister, “Anzeigen,” Intelligenz-Blatt zur Allgemeinen musikalischen Zeitung , no. 11 (November 1835), p. 1.
22. Information about the repertory of Liszt’s German tours, the focus of this study, appears in Michael Saffle’s valuable documentation Liszt in Germany 1840–1845: A Study in Sources, Documents, and the History of Reception (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: 1994).
23. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 , rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: 1987), pp. 157–58, 312–13.
24. Charles Suttoni, “Operatic Paraphrases,” in The Liszt Companion , ed. Ben Arnold (Westport, Conn.: 2002), p. 179.
25. Ibid., pp. 180–82; Leslie Howard, notes to Liszt at the Opera I (Hyperion Records, CDA66371/2, 1990) and Liszt at the Opera V (Hyperion Records, CDA67231/2, 1998).
26. In a letter to Marie d’Agoult, 22 May 1836, Liszt noted the effect of the Réminiscences in concert. Franz Liszt: Selected Letters , ed. and trans. Adrian Williams (Oxford, Eng.: 1998), p. 64.
27. Leslie Howard, notes to Rarities, Curiosities, Album Leaves and Fragments (Hyperion Records, CDA67414/7, 1999).
28. Regarding the migrations of Pacini’s aria, see Hilary Poriss’s valuable study, “Making Their Way Through the World: Italian One-Hit Wonders,” 19th-Century Music 24, no. 3 (2001): 197–224.
29. See the aforementioned letter of Liszt to the publisher from 1869.
30. Gerhard Winkler, “‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’: Meyerbeers Hugenotten in den Paraphrasen Thalbergs und Liszts,” in Der junge Liszt: Referate des 4. Europäischen Liszt-Symposions, Wien 1991 , in Liszt Studien 4 , ed. Gottfried Scholz (Munich: 1993), pp. 100–34.
31. Regarding the different audiences for Liszt and Thalberg in a French context, see Dana Gooley’s fascinating study, “Liszt, Thalberg and the Parisian Publics” in his The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, Eng.: 2004), pp. 18–77.
32. The mechanism for the sale of the music within Germany is not that different from the situation today: customers identified music for purchase from advertisements, etc., they would request it from their local music store, and as stock of specific items dwindled, stores sent orders to publishers, which they filled.
33. The term “honorarium” is taken directly from the Hofmeister documentation and does not imply anything more than a one-time payment to a composer. If a composer requested “free copies” (Freiexemplare ) of the work, those costs would be deducted from the honorarium. At the time (late-1830s and 1840s), Liszt and his fellow composers did not receive royalties. As Liszt’s contract of 1852 with Hofmeister for the organ version of Nicolai’s Kirchliche Fest-ouvertüre reveals, he was not only ceding publication rights to the publisher, but was also selling ownership of the piece. Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Musikverlag Friedrich Hofmeister, 5/1. In comparison with Liszt’s honorarium of 40 talers, Hofmeister in 1840 gave Heinrich Panofka 26 talers for his Elegy , op. 17, and his Fantasy, op. 18, and gave J. P. Pixis 17 talers for the four-handed arrangement of his Third Duo.
34. See William Weber’s Music and the Middle Class (New York: 1975), which despite its age remains unsurpassed in its assessment of the relationship between social class and music in nineteenth-century Europe.
35. Liszt concert review by F. Raabe in the Königliche preussische Staats-, Kriegs-und Friedenszeitung , 12 March 1842, cited in Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt , p. 206.
36. Charles Rosen, “The New Sound of Liszt,” review of Alan Walker’s Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847, New York Review of Books 31, no. 6 (April 12, 1984): 20.
37. “Das Minimum, welches erforderlich war, um die Werke im Publikum einigermaβen zu verbreiten und zugleich Ihnen hinreichende Exemplare zur Verfügung zu stellen.” Letter from Breitkopf & Härtel to Liszt, Leipzig, 9 May 1856; cited in Oskar von Hase, Breitkopf & Härtel , vol. 2, p. 167.
38. The question of the public response to Liszt’s symphonic poems is raised by Keith Johns in “The Performance and Reception of Liszt’s Symphonic Poems in Europe and North America, 1849–1861,” in The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt , ed. Michael Saffle (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: 1997), pp. 83–138. Johns, however, problematically, assumes that the opinions expressed by critics in newspapers and journals are the same as those of concert audiences.
39. Figures from the Auflagenbuch , 1874–, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Musikverlag C. F. Peters, 5222.
40. “Döhler’s gr. Fantaisie de Concert sur la Favorita de Donizetti p. Piano nehme ich für das Honorar von 800 Fr. an, wenn Döhler dieselbe in Concerten vorträgt.” Letter from Heinrich to Maurice Schlesinger, Berlin, 28 April 1844; Frankfurt am Main, Archiv des Musikverlags Zimmermann, Briefkopierbuch.
41. “[Ich] nehme Rosenhayn’s Fant. s. l. Reine de Chypre p. Piano nur dann für 300 Fl. wenn sie Rosenhayn in Concert spielt, sonst nicht.” Letter from Heinrich to Maurice Schlesinger, Berlin, 9 May 1842; Frankfurt am Main, Archiv des Musikverlags Zimmermann, Briefkopierbuch, 395.
42. The undated letter was published by Jacques Vier in Franz Liszt: L’Artiste, le clerc (Paris: 1950), pp. 48–49, and translated by Dana Gooley in The Virtuoso Liszt , p. 56.
43. When Peters issued Theodor Kullak’s edition of the Lieder ohne Worte in 1877, the initial printing was 3,000 copies, followed by 8,000 in 1878, 5,000 yearly from 1879 to 1881, 6,000 in 1882, and culminating in 10,000 copies in 1883 and 1884. Interestingly, these figures parallel those for the more costly “Pracht-Ausgabe.”
44. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: 1955), pp. 59–67.
45. Beverly Gordon, “The Souvenir: Messenger of the Extraordinary,” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 135.
46. Russell Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self,” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988): 160.
47. In an unpublished letter to F. E. C. Leuckert in Breslau, from Berlin, 25 January 1843, Schlesinger offers to send the publisher his most recent Liszt works as well as portraits of the virtuoso, in advance of concert appearances in Breslau. Frankfurt am Main, Archiv des Musikverlags Zimmermann, Briefkopierbuch, 448–449.