Around 1795 George Willig, a German immigrant music publisher who the year before had begun work in Philadelphia, issued “The Fowler,” a piece with piano or guitar accompaniment, subtitled “A Favorite Song by the celebrated Mr. Mozart.” Based on Papageno’s Act One aria in Die Zauberflöte, in which the bird-catcher explains himself to Prince Tamino, this lively three verse song with both English and German words could appeal to many potential customers. Adapted for the average parlor pianist or guitarist, accessible to Philadelphia’s large German community as well as English speakers, the work bore the name Mozart. That one word informed Willig’s customers that he printed and sold superior music.1
For Willig and other publishers profit was, of necessity, the primary motivation, but choices made by early entrepreneurs had significant consequences for the future. Printed matter sold in the new nation’s major cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—largely determined what was read, performed, and later reissued by their counterparts in smaller communities.
Mozart’s music was introduced to American audiences in 1786, with the performance of an unspecified sonata in a Philadelphia concert.2 Within three or four years of his death in 1791, a few Philadelphia and New York publishers began issuing music that bore his name. While titles including “much admired” and “favorite” were typically used to attract customers, describing a composer as celebrated was less common. We cannot be sure why Willig chose this term, or indeed how he acquired his original version of “The Fowler,” but the accuracy of the German text and his own origins suggest that he was more familiar with Mozart’s works than most of his English and American counterparts. It is unlikely his source was British, since the opera was not staged in London until 1811.
By its very nature music is the most elusive and intangible of the arts, and for this reason is often all too briefly treated in history texts, compared to art, literature, and architecture. Yet in many ways it is the most omnipresent and inclusive, offering a vast range of choices, from the excitement of live performances to more muted background sounds tailored for workplaces, and individual choices for the home. It is vital to many forms of worship, and essential to films, radio, and television programming.
Amid an array of seemingly endless choices, cultivated music remains a recognized and, for many, a preferred form. How we almost intuitively define it relies on definitions that grew out of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before audiences and performers began to separate themselves into the tidy categories of “popular” and “classical.” The concept of a musical cannon began in eighteenth-century England. Reverence for “Antient [sic] music” by Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli and others soon led to George Frederick Handel’s admission to the pantheon. Influential British music historians like Charles Burney and Thomas Busby revered Handel but included contemporary composers like Joseph Haydn and Mozart in their multi-volume histories.3
A number of non-British composers such as Handel and J. C. Bach had lived in England, or like Haydn had popular concert tours there in adulthood. Mozart’s English experience was limited to a brief fifteen months; arriving in London at age eight, he performed with his older sister Nannerl and composed a few modest works. His desire to return to Britain never materialized. However a number of his mature works were performed in London as early as 1784, and appeared in print not long thereafter.4 Immigrant publishers with British origins, like the Carr family and George Blake, imported and pirated these and many other works to enrich their inventories.
Part of an historian’s craft is the pleasure of detective work—the pursuit of elusive facts to hopefully “round up the unusual suspects.” After the bicentennial of Mozart’s death in 1991, I began studying the genesis of his music and reputation in antebellum America. It seemed curious that amid a flood of Amadeus-related concerts, books, films, and kitsch, relatively little attention was paid to the early events and individuals that had made his name a household word.
One challenge in tracing Mozart links to antebellum cultural life in the United States is limited information. A great deal of time is spent perusing music collections, diaries, letters, memoirs and contemporary biographies, newspapers, literary magazines, and even visiting old book shops. Since my research links the “finished product”—concerts, plays, operas, performance sites like City Tavern, the New [later Chesnut] Theatre, and Musical Fund Hall—to the more private worlds of printer-publishers and the domestic market that supported them, it was essential to examine the small number of publishers’ catalogues, Philadelphia newspapers, and a few compilations by later scholars, such as Oscar George Sonneck, William Treat Upton, and Richard J. Wolfe.
A different sort of challenge is a natural tendency to equate influence with public performances. Since Mozart’s name usually appeared less frequently on concert and opera programs than do the names of Handel, Haydn, Rossini, Beethoven, and others, some authorities have concluded he had little cultural influence beyond Europe until the twentieth century. However this view ignores publishers, the social music that was their “bread and butter,” and adaptations of cultivated music in theatre productions of the period.
Purists may despise the 1817 extravaganza Don Giovanni: or A Spectre on Horseback, as well as scoff at Henry Rowley Bishop’s opera-romance The Marriage of Figaro, which opened in London on 6 March 1819, and was staged in Philadelphia on 29 December 1824. However these English adaptations introduced cultivated music to diverse audiences that would not have sat through an opera in Italian. Such productions launched songs whose lyrics might be banal, but whose music captured popular interest. As Lawrence Levine notes:
Popular songs in English based on operatic arias could be encountered everywhere in nineteenth-century America. As early as the 1790s the popular song “Away with Melancholy” was derived from an aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute. In 1820 “La ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni took the country by storm as “Now place your hand in mine, dear.” And so it continued for decades.5
Inclusion on concert programs was an essential component in the creation of fame, but publications informed and directed taste. These ranged, in Mozart’s case, from one-page songs to articles in English encyclopedias and literary magazines as early as 1803. The public found his music beautiful, and when adapted to a piano or guitar, not too difficult to play. Victorians also learned that Mozart’s life represented qualities of which they approved: love of family, diligence in one’s work, plus the added fascination of an early mysterious death.
Throughout the nineteenth century middle-class Americans became increasingly preoccupied with gentility. Middle and upper class women, barred by law and custom from much of the public sphere, were exhorted from the pulpit and encouraged by their mothers and their literary magazines to become guardians of proper behavior. The home became a haven and the parlor a shrine filled with books, music, and journals chosen to display refinement and virtue. Women gathered families around the piano to play, sing, or even dance to music derived from the concerts, plays, and in cities like Philadelphia, operas they had recently attended.
A few Americans, from John Adams to William Henry Fry, tried to ignore or minimize European taste, maintaining that the New World’s literature, music, and art needed no foreign influences. However the almost universal choice by publishers to put composers’ names in large type within the titles of the ballads, duets, waltzes, and “favorite airs,” they turned out in such profusion showed that the public wanted to know who created these works.
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century Philadelphia and Boston were America’s two largest publishing centers. While all sorts of music was being produced, by 1825 presses in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and a few smaller cities had issued some 170 Mozart works, compared to about 80 by Haydn, over 50 by Handel, and approximately 30 works by Beethoven.6 Between 1794 and 1861 more than twenty-one Philadelphia publishers had included Mozart’s music (or works ascribed to him) in their inventories. A brief overview of the most influential of these men underscores their influence in Philadelphia and the nation at large.7
Philadelphia was the nation’s second largest city until around 1830, and its wealth and historic associations also gave it a unique place in antebellum American life. From the eighteenth century onward it had been a major publishing center, and its artisans, printers, and publishers would continue to lead the industry for more than one hundred years. At first largely religious in content, music publishing expanded as the desire grew for secular songs. Typefaces were at first imported from the Netherlands and Great Britain, but by 1800 Americans had begun to produce their own. The development of lithography in the 1820s and chromolithogra-phy in the 1840s evolved even as Mozart’s music became part of the fabric of American life. These processes made books and music cheaper and more visually attractive to an increasingly literate public.
Pennsylvania’s first paper mill began operating in 1690, and within fifty years demand was such that many gristmills were converted to papermaking. In 1810 Isaiah Thomas noted in The History of Printing in America that of at least 185 paper mills in the United States, Pennsylvania had “about sixty.”8 Local mills supplied rag paper for Philadelphia’s publishing industry and its Mint, which exerted an influence far beyond the State’s borders.
Philadelphia’s historic publishing district was in the center of the city, where Chesnut and Market Streets intersected second through Fifth Streets. Most pre-Civil War printers, publishers, and music sellers spent some part of their careers here. In mixed neighborhoods of homes, taverns, churches, grocers, bookbinders, and tailors’ shops, music dealers worked close together and near the various theatres and Musical Fund Hall. Patrons could easily purchase music they had heard on-stage. Only by mid-century did newer publishers prefer to locate in the more fashionable uptown districts.9
Like other nineteenth-century merchants, publishers often occupied two or three ground floor rooms with living quarters above them. The main room, which served as a retail center, might not be very large; the South Fifth Street shop of George Blake, one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most successful publishers, was only about twenty by thirty feet. Engraving and printing were done in a back room, unless one’s plates were sent out to professional printers.10
Throughout America during this period music was sold in separate sheets for purchasers to bind as they chose, with usually twenty to forty sheets in a volume. Many nineteenth-century works survive only because of these personalized collections. From about 1815 through the 1850s, music paper was sometimes colored lavender, pale green, blue, pink, or yellow for the feminine market. Both George Willig and Philadelphia’s popular Godey’s Lady’s Book used colored music paper until the 1850s, when it was no longer considered attractive.11
Since full calfskin was costly, many private collections had marbleized covers with calf on the corners and spine. A label with the owner’s name and a title such as “Sonatas” completed a front cover. Initially the music itself was something of a luxury; in 1816 one sheet cost twelve and a half cents, the same price as a quart of milk or five Havana cigars.12 Hand-copied music was thus a major component of many collections. For example, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters Ellen and Virginia supplemented their elders’ choices with hand-copied waltzes and opera excerpts. Like many young ladies of their social standing, they were proficient in singing, harpsichord, piano, and guitar.13
For a variety of reasons, determining the number of any city’s pre-Civil War publishers is challenging. Performers and music teachers issued music for themselves or for their pupils. Imprints sometimes lacked business addresses, and until the 1840s dates were often omitted, since a major selling point was that the music was “New.” As in Europe, literary piracy was almost universal. The first American copyright act of 1790 did not include foreign works. The more popular a European book or composition, the sooner it would appear in a pirated American edition. Publishers in the same city often issued competing versions of the same work, with only minor changes in the title or the music itself. Music was not even deemed a copyright category until 1831.
Benjamin Carr would become one of America’s most influential early publishers. Carr was born in London in 1768, and an important influence in his early life was the English organist-composer Samuel Arnold. In 1789 Arnold was conductor of the prestigious Academy of Ancient Music. Carr may have decided to come to the United States after it was disbanded in 1792.14
Reaching Philadelphia at the outset of a virulent yellow fever epidemic in 1793, Carr was soon joined by his parents Joseph and Mary, and his brother Thomas who settled in Baltimore. With the 1794 opening of a third shop in New York, the Carr family created the nation’s first multicity publishing business. Though not as active a publisher as his brother, Thomas Carr was a composer and arranger. His greatest achievement is that in 1814 he set the words of Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star Spangled Banner” to a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Their ties to London’s publishing world and their technical skills helped the Carr family dominate the Philadelphia-Baltimore markets for nearly two decades. During his thirty-eight years in Philadelphia Benjamin Carr pursued many musical careers; along with publishing he was also a singer-actor, composer, church organist, and in 1820, a founding member of the Musical Fund Society.15
One of Carr’s and colleague Ralph Shaw’s earliest collections was The Gentleman’s Amusement, arrangements for up to three flutes or violins, in seven issues between April 1794 and May 1796. Both the title and the series’ six-dollar cost were indicators for whom it was intended. Flutes, recorders, and violins were thought to disturb facial expressions and thus were played by men. The price limited these arrangements to the upper middle class.
“Grand March from the Opera of The Prisoner,” a duet for flutes or violins in issue 2, 1794, and an unspecified “Duetto” for either flutes or violins in issue 9 (ca. 1796) are two of the earliest Mozart adaptations published in the United States. They are also rare in that their dates can be determined with some accuracy. Thomas Attwood, Mozart’s English piano pupil from 1785 to 1787, composed The Prisoner in 1792. “Grand March” was based on the popular aria “Non piú andrai” from Le nozze di Figaro (1786).16 The Gentleman’s Amusement’s success led Carr to offer Military Amusements (1796) for the same set of instruments; it included another “Mozart March.”
Musical Journal for the Piano Forte (1800–1804), five volumes of vocal and keyboard music, much of it pirated from British ballad operas, was both more ambitious and also intended for both women and men. Number 20—a “Turkish Air”—in instrumental Volume One was a simpler version of Mozart’s popular 1783 “Alla Turca” Rondo in A Major (K. 331). The duet with piano accompaniment in the vocal section of Volume Four, no. 95: “Ah perdona al primo affetto,” from Act I, Scene II of La Clemenza di Tito (K. 621) was also probably chosen because that opera was currently in vogue; though next to the last operatic work that Mozart composed (1791), it was the first to be given in its entirety in Britain (1806).17 There would be at least ten American reprints in Italian or English of “Ah perdona” between 1802 and the mid-1840s.18
After Musical Journal the Carrs published less frequently during the three decades before Benjamin Carr’s death on 24 May 1831. In 1822, after the death of their father Joseph, Thomas Carr had sold his interest in the Baltimore business to George Willig and come to Philadelphia. In his last Mozart adaptation in 1823, Benjamin Carr returned to La Clemenza di Tito for “The Landing of Columbus,” a celebratory ode whose music was based on a march and chorus in the opera’s first act. Even as the Romans in the opera proclaimed the virtues of Emperor Titus, so the orchestra and chorus of Philadelphia’s newly incorporated Musical Fund Society celebrated Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella.
Spain’s queen was a romantic figure to many Americans, so “The Landing of Columbus” may have been given in the Society’s third concert on 24 April 1823 in honor of her birthday, April 22.19 Reprised to celebrate the Society’s newly completed Hall on 9 December 1824, it was also part of an 1838 concert at the black Second Presbyterian Church, with works by Handel and Haydn.20
Their choice of an obviously European piece may seem curious in the twenty-first century, which celebrates the unique richness of African-American music. However free black communities in northern cities like Philadelphia and New York saw cultivated music as a means to show whites that they shared many Victorian middle class aspirations. “Tunes and hymns of your own composing”—i.e., spirituals—were discouraged by some black Methodists. Formal concerts by African-Americans in New York and Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s included Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Rossini.21
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quakers and Baptists habitually condemned theatre and dancing. Theatres were illegal in a number of cities including Philadelphia, prior to the Revolution, and travelling actors were blamed by the godly for everything from encouraging sin to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. By the early nineteenth century however, most Americans accepted theatre, and it helped familiarize Mozart’s music to urban audiences. By 1812 Philadelphia had two (and during some seasons three) theatres vying for audiences. Subjects included farces, romantic melodramas, Shakespeare, and operatic plays in English, including by 1824 The Marriage of Figaro and two versions of Don Giovanni.
However the most popular domestic music was waltzes for one or two pianists, and it was in this category that Mozart’s name most often appeared. In researching waltz tunes in America to 1824, Michael Broyles found fifty-seven attributed to Mozart, compared to seventeen waltzes by pianist-composer Muzio Clementi, and sixteen attributed to New York musician-publisher James Hewitt.22
Mozart composed numerous minuets, but technically never a waltz, which was a nineteenth-century dance form. The many “Mozart Waltzes” attributed to him were variations on two or three of his works, probably the most authentic adapted from his Six German Dances (K. 606). However, as Broyles notes, “in this case [the] actual composer is a secondary issue. Who wrote the piece matters less than who people thought wrote the piece.”23 Various “Admired,” “Favorite,” and “Celebrated” Mozart waltzes abounded throughout the United States.
George Willig issued many waltzes, and indeed all kinds of music. Born in 1764, he began his Philadelphia career by acquiring plates from other businessmen and reprinting their stock as well as his own choices, like “The Fowler.” He also taught music and sold pianos and concert tickets.24 In 1845 Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of Philadelphia described him as a “respectable and much esteemed teacher and seller of music,” and estimated his material worth at $75,000 (a sum roughly equivalent to a $1,000,000 in twenty-first century currency).25
Between 1812 and 1850 Willig published more than fifty Mozart titles, including fifteen waltzes. While Die Zauberflöte, Figaro, Don Giovanni, and La Clemenza di Tito provided the basis for twenty-one of thirty-four songs, other pieces were taken from a variety of Mozart Lieder.26 However Willig’s major contribution to American music was his three catalogues. Before this innovation publishers might list a few titles on the back of a music sheet, or advertised their latest stock in a newspaper.
Catalogue of Songs. Printed & Sold by G. Willig at his Musical Magazine … [1807–1808] was the first of its type in the United States. Four pages long plus a supplement, it had about 750 titles, including works from other publishers. At least nine titles were attributed to Mozart. The 1824 Catalogue of Vocal and Instrumental Music Published by George Willig, Importer of Musical Instruments and Music Publisher … included more than 800 Willig imprints arranged in groups; songs filled four pages, followed by marches, dances, airs, sonatas, and other instrumental categories. This catalogue listed twenty-nine Mozart works or adaptations.27
Willig’s last catalogue (1835) included more than 2000 items. Of about forty Mozart pieces, nineteen were songs in English or Italian; six waltzes were the next largest category. Willig made clear in his introductory paragraph that he set his sights on potential customers far beyond Philadelphia:
G.W. is constantly supplied with new European and American musical publications. Orders from any part of the United States, West Indies, or South America [are] attended to with care and dispatch.28
A quarter century of publishing had also led to decreasing prices. The average two-page song, which cost twenty-five cents in 1807, was twelve and a half cents by 1835, while single sheets formerly twelve cents were now six cents.29 More efficient distribution by rail, and advertising in popular national magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book, contributed to Willig’s success for more than half a century. He died on 30 December 1851, aged eighty-seven. About five years later his former clerks, George W. Lee and Julius Walker acquired the Philadelphia shop. Willig’s son and grandsons kept the Baltimore branch of the business until 1910.
From 1849 to 1851 Lee & Walker briefly took advantage of a unique locale; their store was on the first floor of P. T. Barnum’s Museum at 162 Chesnut Street. When it burned in December 1851 they relocated to a less public site two blocks away and acquired a fireproof vault. Walker died in 1857, but Lee remained in business another eighteen years publishing sacred music, popular songs such as “Dixie,” and operatic adaptations from, among others, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflöte, and Figaro. Seventy years after Carr and Shaw issued “Non più andrai,” Lee & Walker sold their own version.30
A. Bacon & Company was another important Philadelphia firm. Allyn Bacon moved from Connecticut around 1813, and soon his store at No. 11 South Fourth Street became a gathering-place for local musicians.31 While not as long-lived as the Carrs, Willig, Blake, or his successor John G. Klemm (1823–1879), Bacon issued eight “Mozart waltzes,” a march, two “airs and variations” for piano, and two books of Select Airs from the Celebrated Operas Composed by Mozart—twelve Don Giovanni arias arranged for piano and flute.
Prior to lithography, American music was sparsely illustrated. Typical images included simple borders on title pages, flowers, birds, wreaths, military symbols, or musical instruments. Thus the title page of Bacon’s two volume Select Airs from the Celebrated Operas Composed by Mozart. Arranged for the Piano Forte … (ca. 1819) is visually remarkable. Below the intricately lettered title sits a young man before a plinth inscribed “Mozart.” The plinth is decorated with a lyre, eternal flame, and crown of stars and is surmounted by a truncated column, symbolic of untimely death. The youth holds an open book inscribed “Oeuvres de Mozart.” Behind the monument are willow trees, and below the figure lies a fallen branch, also denoting death.
Bacon would hardly have authorized such elaborate artwork unless he was sure this visual tribute would generate sales. The name “C. Gobrecht” forms part of the title’s decoration. Around 1820 Christian Gobrecht was an ambitious young artist. By 1836 he was the Assistant Engraver at the United States Mint. Once becoming Chief Engraver (1840) he redesigned much of America’s coinage.32
Each of these publishers made unique contributions to his occupation and to America’s cultural history. In addition to providing superior quality music for an increasingly sophisticated public, Gustav André was directly linked to Mozart through his father and grandfather. The family publishing house was founded in Offenbach am Main in 1774 by Johann André, an amateur composer and friend of Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Shortly after Johann’s death in 1799, his son Johann Anton André purchased a large number of manuscripts from Mozart’s widow Constanze.33
Friendship played a significant part in Constanze’s choice; Mozart had visited the Andrés during a journey to Frankfurt in 1790, and young J. Anton had been present with him at a rehearsal of Don Giovanni in Mannheim that same year. André published about fifty-five Mozart compositions between 1800 and 1830, and began organizing his manuscripts in hopes of issuing a complete chronological catalogue. His efforts were used by Edward Holmes in the first English-language biography of Mozart in 1845, and in Ludwig Ritter von Köchel’s Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke WolfgangAmadé Mozarts (1862).34
J. Anton André had fifteen children, several of whom became publishers, musicians, instrument makers, or music dealers. Carl August, Julius, and Johann August’s biographies are in The New Grove or the Norton-Grove Music Printing and Publishing, but Gustav was one of five other sons, about whom less is known. He published and imported music in London at several addresses in 1838–1839, moved to New York in 1843, and then to Philadelphia, where his firm remained in business from 1850 to 1879.35 Family connections gave Gustav an obvious advantage over his competitors; for example, an 1850s André edition of Mozart’s piano concertos included the note that they were based on original manuscripts.36
The era of Philadelphia’s early publishers ended with the death of George Blake in 1871. Born in England about 1775, the multi-talented Blake came to Philadelphia around 1793, and began giving flute and clarinet lessons. By the first decade of the nineteenth century he was making pianos. He also created a musical circulating library and became one of eighty-five charter members of the Musical Fund Society.
From around 1810 through the 1830s Blake was America’s most prolific music publisher, issuing popular songs, sacred works, British and American theatre music, and excerpts from Italian operas. His imprints were sold in urban shops from New York to New Orleans, and to private collectors in Virginia, including Jefferson and the Cockes of Bremo.37
Blake published more than sixty Mozart works, attributions, or adaptations, with at least twelve titles identical or similar to ones issued by the Carrs or Willig.38 His most extensive series, A Selection from the Vocal Compositions of Mozart United to English Verses, The Accompaniments for the Piano Forte Arranged from the Original Scores by Muzio Clementi. The Poetry by David Thomson. To the Admirers of Mozart, this Work is Respectfully Dedicated by the Publisher was issued in three parts (each $1.50) between 1815–1821.
This particular set shows Blake’s keen business sense on several levels. Italian-born Muzio Clementi, who spent much of his life in England, was well known on both sides of the Atlantic as a composer, arranger, and businessman. Add to Clementi the magical name of Mozart, and customers had the sort of music that would grace any parlor, works which would show the owner to be a person of taste and wealth.
Of the twenty-three songs with English titles and verses by minor British poet David Thomson, eleven were duets or solos based on arias in Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Così fan tutte, Die Zauberflöte, or La Clemenza di Tito. Blake would have known that many potential customers had heard excerpts from La Clemenza di Tito and Figaro in various concerts, and had seen The Libertine either in New York, or at Philadelphia’s New Theatre in December 1818. Twelve other songs were derived from several editions of Mozart’s works.39
Blake was most active through the 1830s; by the 1850s he was issuing no new music. The absence of his name on a list of twenty-seven men, including six Philadelphians, who signed the Board of Music Trade’s articles of association at their New York convention on June 6–8, 1855 implies he had lost interest in current events.40 Still Philadelphia’s senior publisher kept his shop open until his death on 20 February 1871.
During more than six decades an increased knowledge of Mozart and his music offered something to nearly everyone, whether professionals, publishers, or consumers. Musicians were nearly unanimous in praising his genius. Editors and publishers knew that Mozart’s name on a title page facilitated sales. Romantics saw him as one of the chosen few who interpreted the eternal harmonies of God to humanity. Amateurs who purchased his music—including the waltzes that bore his name—felt that, as with Shakespeare, some knowledge and appreciation of Wolfgang Mozart was a vital form of self-education.
Mozart and his music were, in effect, serving two dissimilar masters: musical idealism and mass entertainment. While other musical geniuses, most notably Beethoven, would later become equally omnipresent in both the concert hall and the marketplace, Mozart was the first composer and performer to be elevated by the English-speaking world to super-stardom. This process still continues.
1. “The Fowler. A Favorite Song by the celebrated Mr. Mozart. Printed and sold at G. Willig’s Musical Magazine.” [ca. 1795] For added appeal the German verses were set in Gothic type. Both German and English verses accurately reflect the opera’s libretto.
2. The first performance in the United States of a Mozart work—a “Sonata Piano Forte” by Alexander Reinagle—took place on 14 December 1786, in a concert at Philadelphia’s City Tavern. The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser. 13 December 1786.
3. William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3–5, 99–100, 124–125, 223–224.
4. John Jenkins, Mozart and the English Connection (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998), 142. Cliff Eisen, New Mozart Documents: A Supplement to O. E. Deutsch’s Documentary Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 136–142.
5. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 96.
6. Carlton Sprague Smith, Introduction to Secular Music in America 1801–1825: A Bibliography, 3 vols, by Richard J. Wolfe (New York: New York Public Library, 1964), vol. I, x.
7. Publishers include John Aitken, the Carr family, Ralph Shaw, George Willig, George Blake, J. C. Hommann, William McCulloch, George Balls, Henry Lewis, Allyn Bacon, J. G. Klemm, R. H. Hobson, Fiot & Meignen, Kretschmar & Nunns, James Kay, Edmund Ferrett, Lee & Walker, C. F. Hupfeld, Gustav André, Frederick Rullman, J. G. Auner, and J. C. Viereck.
8. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (Worcester: MA, 1810), quoted in Dard Hunter, Papermaking In Pioneer America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), 19.
9. Harry Dichter and Elliott Shapiro, Early American Sheet Music: Its Lure and Its Lore 1768–1889) (NewYork: R. R. Bowker Co., 1941), 166–169, 172, 177–179, 191, 197, 211, 214, 244.
10. Richard J. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 71–74.
11. Julia Eklund Koza, “Music and References to Music in Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830–1877” (Ph.D. dissertation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), 453–454.
12. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian of the City of New York: 1816–1860 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 57–58.
13. The Monticello Music Collection, the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
14. Stephen C. Siek, “Musical Taste in post-Revolutionary America as Seen Through Carr’s ‘Musical Journal for the Piano Forte.’” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1991), 49–53, 55–56, 60–62.
15. Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, Bibliography of Early Secular American Music: [18th Century]. Revised and enlarged by William Treat Upton. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress Music Division. 1945), 501–502, 575–578. Siek, ii, 131–132.
16. Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 518–519.
17. Benjamin Carr, Musical Journal for the Piano Forte (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Research Inc., 1972), 2 vols. Instrumental, vol. I, 37; Vocal, vol. II, 69–71.
18. Carr included an English translation of the libretto. Wolfe, Secular Music, II, 603, 606.
19. Assuming the concert date was not random, Isabella seems to best fit the facts. Columbus’ birth year is uncertain; the sighting of San Salvador occurred on 12 October 1492. Columbus died on 20 May 1506; Isabella had died on 24 November 1504.
20. “The Landing of Columbus … music from Mozart’s opera of La Clemenza di Tito and performed … at the concerts of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. The adaptation by Benjamin Carr.” (New York: I. P. Cole, 1825). Public Ledger, 4 January 1838.
21. Eileen Southern, “Musical Practices in Black Churches of Philadelphia and New York, ca. 1800–1844,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 30/2: 296–299, 302, 306–307.
22. Michael Broyles, “Mozart: America’s First Waltz-King,” 6. A paper given 10 February 2001, Mozart Society of America conference, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I am grateful to Dr. Broyles for a copy of his text.
23. Broyles, “Mozart: America’s First Waltz-King,” 5.
24. Donald W. Krummel, “Philadelphia Music Engraving and Publishing 1800–1820” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1958), 109. Wolfe, Secular Music, vol. II, 622–624.
25. Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of Philadelphia, Containing an Alphabetical Arrangement of Persons Estimated to be Worth $50,000 and Upwards (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1845), 22.
26. Wolfe, Secular Music, vol. II, 607.
27. Mozart works/arrangements in the 1824 Catalogue of Vocal and Instrumental Music include fifteen songs, two marches, four waltzes, a minuet, a rondo, three variations, a piano duet, a sonata, and a flute arrangement. Wolfe, Secular Music, III, 970.
28. Catalogue of Vocal and Instrumental Music … by George Willig (1835), 1–3, 5–8, 10–12.
29. Catalogue of Vocal and Instrumental Music Published and for Sale by George Willig (Philadelphia: Willig, 1835).
30. “Noteworthy Philadelphia: A City’s Musical Heritage, 1750–1915,” Exhibition catalog. The Library Company of Philadelphia: 1997, 33–34. Oliver Ditson of Boston acquired the firm after Lee’s death in 1875.
31. The Sunday Dispatch, 13 February 1859.
32. Gobrecht’s redesigned coinage ranged from half cents to ten dollar gold pieces; his design for the five dollar gold piece (or half eagle) lasted from 1839 to 1908.
33. Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 490–492. August Hermann André, Zur Geschichte der Familie André (Offenbach am Main: Offenbacher Geschichtsverein, 1962), 18–19.
34. Deutsch, Mozart, 492. Wolfgang Plath, “André,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, eds. Stanley Sadie, John Tyrrell, and Laura Macy (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. I, 618–621.
35. Charles Humphries and William C. Smith, Music Publishing in the British Isles: From the Beginning until the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: A Dictionary of Engravers, Printers, Publishers and Music Sellers, with a Historical Introduction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 52–53. A. H. André, 33, Dichter and Shapiro, 166.
36. “W. A. Mozart’s Klavier-Conzerte in Partitur …” [1852–1859].
37. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Publishing, 45–47. Krummel and Sadie, 177. I am indebted to Dr. Ronald R. Kidd at Purdue University for information on the Cockes; the Bremo music is in Swemm Library, the College of William and Mary.
38. Dorothy Turner Potter, “The Cultural Influences of W. A. Mozart’s Music in Philadelphia: 1786–1861,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2000), 348–352.
39. Wolfe, Secular Music, vol. II, 610, 612–613, 629–630.
40. Philadelphia members were G. André, James N. Beck, J. E. Gould, Lee & Walker, Edward L. Walker, and Winner & Schuster. Dena J. Epstein, “Music Publishing in the Age of Piracy: the Board of Music Trade and its Catalogue,” Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 31 (September 1974): 10–12.