CHASE

Detailed lending library catalogues from this period are now extremely scarce. Only two survive for Novello’s very large ‘Universal Circulating Musical Library’ (for 1860 and 1868, in the New York Public Library and the British Library respectively), and only one for Apel’s lending library in Kiel; a copy of the American library Kerksieg and Breusing’s 1850 catalogue is also held in New York (Reese, ibid., p.8.). Advertisements for such libraries do not normally give very much detail. Their catalogues could be very substantial publications several hundred pages long in very small print, but nonetheless were normally distributed free (or very cheaply), and presumably simply discarded when out of date. Since, crucially, not subject to copyright deposit, they cannot be assumed to be available in national collections. Copies of music hired out through libraries are equally rare — they can usually be identified by a uniform binding or library label. When such libraries ceased to function, a common occurrence in the nineteenth century – there was a rapid turnover, especially in France - their collections were often simply destroyed. This practice continued even in modern times; when the firm of Durand relocated in Paris after the Second World War, its entire hire library was destroyed, because of the greatly increased cost of real estate which made storage prohibitively expensive (Anita Breckbill and Carol Goebes, ‘Music Circulating Libraries in France: an Overview and a Preliminary List’, Notes, 63 (2007), p. 782.). Many lending libraries would offer some form of free bonus, or other added value. Subscribers could be rewarded with a certain amount of free music each year, or could buy the music they borrowed on payment of a small additional charge (in effect, a type of hire purchase). Ewer & Co.’s library, under the direction of William Witt, offered subscribers free access to public concerts. It was at one of these concerts that Brahms’s String Sextet op. 18 was first performed in England in 1863 (‘Mr. William Witt’, Musical Herald, May 1, 1900, p.134.) Ewer also promoted concerts to introduce subscribers to the latest compositions (MW, 41 (1863), p. 1). Louis Jullien’s 'Musical Presentation Library' also connected subscribers and concert audiences. An 1846 advertisement announced that the dances recently enjoyed at the Royal Academy and Polish Balls could be found at his Royal Conservatory of Music and Circulating Library (MW, 21 (1846), p. 284), and a song and a cornet solo which did well at his concert in November 1848 were available through his library the following month (Athenaeum, 1101, 2nd December 1848, p. 1221). Jullien offered subscribers three guineas’ worth of music gratis each year, half of which had to be chosen from Jullien’s own publications. This was the same amount as the annual subscription, which suggests he relied on the more expensive shorter-term subscriptions for profit — Scheurmann’s 'Universal Circulating Musical Library' only gave one guinea’s worth of free music for an annual subscription of two guineas (English Review, 19/37 (April 1853), p. 2). Jullien claimed to offer 100,000 items in 1857. This would have made his the largest music lending library in Europe at the time, and is almost certainly an exaggeration, although it should be noted that in 1786 Joseph Dale’s library advertised a catalogue of more than 100,000 volumes (Athenaeum, 1532 (1857), p. 294; Charles Humphries and William C. Smith, Music Publishing in the British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 126 - my thanks to Emma Greenwood, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, for the latter reference). In 1878 his library eventually passed to Trinity College, London, from A. W. Hammond & Co., who took over his business in 1859. All references to Jullien’s Circulating Library disappeared from the press once the business had transferred to Hammond. They traded from the same premises at 214 Regent Street until 1865 when they moved to 5 Vigo Street. When Trinity College acquired the library it consisted of 1,000 volumes, including ‘a great variety of classical, orchestral, and vocal scores, string quartets, trios, and other concerted music, besides a large amount of classical, piano, and vocal music’ (Humphrey Stark, ‘Trinity College London’, MW (1878), p. 33). The copyrights, plates and stock of Jullien & Co. were sold in December 1857 (Literary Gazette, 2136, December 26 1857, p. 1244). Approximately 250 items from this collection are now held at Trinity Laban Academy, London. It is probable that in the period 1859-1878 Hammond gradually sold off music from the library. 

A glimpse of the resources available to subscribers can be found in the 1853 advertisement for C. L. Graue’s Universal Circulating Musical Library (MT, 5 (1853), p. 207). This very substantial library was eventually taken over by Novello, and by the end of the century it was one of the largest in Europe. The 1853 advertisement claims to offer 4,910 items of instrumental music out of a total collection of 35,070. An advertisement in the same issue of the Musical Times gives some more detail, showing different categories of instrumental music. This shows that there were, for example, 408 string quartets, constituting roughly 10% of the total instrumental works. Not surprisingly, works for violin dominate the individual instrumental categories, but it is striking how many cello works are advertised – a total of 290 works, including 76 concertos and other solo compositions. The quantity of violin and cello instructional books and exercises suggests that Graue probably offered a good cross-section of the available pedagogical literature. This could not have been solely based on the most up-to-date publications, which raises the possibility that there could be many amateurs who learned from much older methods, not only from the most recent. 

The Publishing of Annotated Editions 

Editions of music specifically edited with additional performance markings, and described as such on title pages, begin to appear in the 1840s. Prior to this date, there are examples of string music published with bowing and fingering indications, but these editions are often not advertised as such, with title-page claims tending in other directions. Typically, in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the publisher may emphasise 

• the novelty of the work 
• its technical accessibility 
• some form of direct contact with the composer (if still alive or only recently deceased) 
• the textual correctness of the edition 
• the approval of the work by other ‘masters’ 

Much later in the nineteenth century, such claims can assert a connection with tradition:

• the tradition of the composer (if dead for some time)
• a pedagogical tradition 
• a tradition of performance practice. 
  

The edition of the Beethoven Violin Concerto published by Richault in 1828 explicitly connects with both the anniversary of the composer’s death the previous year and a specific player’s performance: 

Exécutée a Paris par M. BAILLOT, aux concert donné pour l’anniversaire de la mort de l’Auteur, dans la salle de l’Ecole royale de Musique ... [see the original here]

This edition contains fingering and bowing markings, most probably taken from the soloist’s copy, which was presumably used as the Stichvorlage, but the publisher does not use this explicitly as a selling point. There are several differences between this edition and the version given in Baillot’s L’art du violon (1835). Overtly pedagogical works by Baillot and Spohr include detailed explanations of how to play concerto movements and other solo repertoire (a practice continued by Ferdinand David, Friedrich Grützmacher, and Joseph Joachim), but these are clearly for the use of advanced students. Editions carrying some additional performance annotations - not the composer’s own - while not uncommon in the earlier 19th century, were generally published for the use of advanced students, and when this was not the case the annotations were not seen as a marketable feature. Although Julius Dotzauer’s edition of the Bach solo cello suites (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1826) is probably the first moderately detailed performing edition of any string music explicitly to offer ‘le Doigter et les Coups d’Archet’, the suites are presented as, at least in part, technical exercises (as was the defective edition published in Paris by Janet et Cotelle in 1824), which connects them with pedagogical function of such publications. From the 1840s onwards, however, editions of individual musical works begin to appear explicitly edited for the user’s benefit, claiming to offer detailed indications of fingering, bowing, and expression, with the editor’s name prominently displayed, along with more traditional claims for textual authority. This is not to say that editions did not continue to be published which simply presented the user with a well-edited text free from obvious mistakes. The fine edition of Haydn’s complete string quartets edited by the virtuoso violinist Carl Lipinski (Dresden: Wilhelm Paul, 1851) contains no additional information about fingering or bowing, apart from Haydn’s own fingering markings at those few places where he requires a particular effect. This is to all intents and purposes a textual, not a performing, edition, although Lipinski does add metronome markings to every movement. Similarly, Ferdinand David’s violin arrangements of Mendelssohn’s B flat major cello sonata (1839) and of Chopin’s cello sonata (1850) are virtually free from additional performance annotations of any kind. David’s edition of the Bach solo violin sonatas (Kistner, 1843), however, was the first in a long line of David’s performing editions, with much additional information supplied to the user as the title page makes clear:  

For use at the Conservatorium in Leipzig, provided with fingerings, bowings and other markings by Ferdinand David. For those who want to mark this composition themselves, the original text, which is most precisely revised according to the composer’s autograph in Royal Library in Berlin, is included in small notes. ['Zum Gebrauch bei dem Conservatorium zu Leipzig, mit Fingersatz, Bogenstrichen und sonstigen Bezeichnungen versehen von Ferdinand David. Für Diejenigen, welche sich dieses Werk selbst bezeichnen wollen, ist den Original-Text, welcher nach der auf der Königl. Bibliothek zu Berlin befindlichen Original-hand-schrift des Componisten auf genaueste revidiert ist, mit kleinem Noten beigefügt.'] 

This conservatoire market had been expanding for some time, with books of general music theory, and instrumental and vocal tutors. D. Weber’s Allgemeine theoretisch-praktische Vorschule der Musik had been published in 1830 for the Prague Conservatoire, and Baillot’s L’art du violon was linked with the Paris Conservatoire, as was Cherubini’s Solfège pour la Voix d’Alto et Tenore (1836). But specific editions of musical works, explicitly aimed at students, were a new development in the 1840s, and David’s Bach edition appears to be the first substantial example of this kind, only partly anticipated by Dotzauer’s Bach for the cello. David also offers an un-marked text for those who wish to use this (probably under the influence of Mendelssohn), making claims for textual accuracy that the music-buying public would have been familiar with, but adding something new in acknowledging that some players would prefer to work directly from this text. David’s Bach was followed by his edition of Paganini’s Capricen (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1854), also for the use of the Leipzig Conservatorium. Many of David’s subsequent editions of solo violin repertoire carried this sort of title page inscription, as did those reprinted and sometimes re-edited by other violinists after his death in 1873. 

Where chamber, rather than solo, works for strings are concerned, performing editions carrying the annotations of a famous performer/teacher arrive somewhat later. In the earlier nineteenth century, piano works both new and old were routinely advertised as including fingerings (Czerny’s fingered editions of Beethoven and Bach appeared in the 1830s; his own piano sonata no. 10 was ‘doigté’ at its first publication in 1833). Some string works were also described in this way, such as J. B. Gross’s easy cello duets op. 5 (1832), ‘mit Bezeichnung der Lagen’ (marking of positions) . But more inclusive claims for the extent of additional annotation begin to appear somewhat later, as in David’s edition of a selection of 31 of Haydn’s piano trios in the mid-1850s. This series, published by Breitkopf, appeared over the period 1852-56. Trios 1-15 (1852-1855) and were announced as ‘Neue, genau bezeichnete Ausgabe’ ('new, exactly marked, edition'). With the subsequent issue of the trios in 2- and 3-volume sets, an explicit link to the Leipzig Conservatorium appears on the title page of each instrumental part: 'Neue Ausgabe zum Gebrauch beim Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig genau bezeichnet von F. David'. This is one of the first examples of the work ‘Ausgabe’ being used in the context of an annotated (‘bezeichnet’) edition. Prior to c.1850, it appears on title pages only in the general sense of ‘edition’ – either a later one (second, fourth), a ‘new’ edition, or a textually corrected edition. Its use with David’s Haydn trios may therefore connote an additional degree of authority (it does not, for example, appear on the title page of David’s unaccompanied Bach). Soon after the publication of David’s Haydn trios, André began to issue a selection of Haydn piano trios edited, not by a string player, but by the pianist Czerny – a 'Neue Ausgabe mit Bezeichnung des Vortrags und Fingersatzes' (Offenbach: André, 1858). This series was issued quickly at first, with 11 trios published together in 1858. Thereafter it progressed more slowly, with a further 12 appearing over the period 1861-1868. Almost simultaneously, and considerably more quickly, the Berlin firm of Bote &Bock produced a further edition of all 31 trios, edited by Carl Böhmer, c.1861-c.1863 (trio no. 8 appears in Hofmeister Monatsbericht in September 1862; nos. 28—31 in September 1863.). Böhmer had already edited other string works, such as some of Beethoven’s quartets, but these and his Haydn trios are textual editions with no added performance annotations. 

It may be that at this stage in the emergence of annotated editions of chamber music, it was seen as more competitive to issue the work edited by a completely different type of instrumentalist, whereas later in the century rival editions of the same works were published all of which were edited by different violinists, or cellists, as the case might be. David immediately followed the Haydn trios with editions of Mozart’s string quartets - the 'celebrated' ten, consisting of the six dedicated to Haydn, the three ‘Prussian’, and the ‘Hoffmeister’. They appeared very quickly over a few months in 1857. ‘No. 1’ (K.387) was listed in Hofmeister in February 1857 and ‘No. 10’ (K.575 – David’s numbering does not correspond exactly to the modern sequence) in May the same year. According to Hofmeister this was a ‘Neue Ausgabe, genau bezeichnet von Ferdinand David’. Only with the later 1873 issue did the title page state ‘Neue Ausgabe zum Gebrauch beim Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig, genau bezeichnet von Ferdinand David’. The same pattern can be seen in David’s editions of Mozart string quintets, also published first as ‘genau bezeichnet von Ferdinand David’, and then re-issued using the same plates but with the more elaborate text linking the edition with the Leipzig Conservatorium. It would appear that in the earlier stages of the production of these editions, they were not explicitly connected with music conservatoria. In the 1850s and 60s, although solo violin and cello works were often edited for the use of a conservatoire, not all chamber works are specifically aimed at this market. Perhaps publishers did not want to discourage increasing amateur demand at a time when the German middle classes were embracing the ideals of Hausmusik and the new lay musical institutions such as Liedertafeln or Singakademien (Anthony Newcomb, ‘Schumann and the Marketplace: from Butterflies to Hausmusik’, in R. Larry Todd (ed.), 19th-Century Piano Music (New York: Schurmer Books, 1990), p. 272).   

The performing, or annotated, edition appears to be at first mainly a German innovation, and much less common in France. Chamber music was certainly published in Paris in the earlier 19th century, but distinctive aspects of French musical life may have limited the demand for such texts. German publishers with a commercial link to a French one may well have been able to promote their publications in Paris; for example, Hofmeister and Richault worked in this way. The often-repeated statement that 19th-century French taste ran mainly to opera rather than instrumental music, while not totally without foundation, has been known to be inaccurate for some time (Jeffrey Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris 1828—1871 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983). In 1828-1871 there were some 120 concert series in all in Paris, many of which were short-lived, but among which were 50 series specifically devoted to chamber music, which was also included in the programmes of another 35 series. However, performance standards could be variable, so much so that string quartet movements were often played in concerts by a full string orchestra. One of the more prominent chamber music series was that run by the Societé Alard-Franchomme, sometimes called the Societé de Musique de Chambre, which ran c.1847-c.1872. The society explicitly chose to concentrate on the music of the ‘grands maîtres’, which in practice meant Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Other chamber music societies included the Societé des derniers quatuors de Beethoven (active c.1851-c.1870) and the Societé des quatuors de Mendelssohn (1856-1867). For few years, 1837-1840, a quartet comprising Alard, Dancla, Croisilles and Franchomme performed string quartets, again favouring the German repertoire of the later Societé Alard-Franchomme. 

However, unlike Leipzig, where Ferdinand David led the Gewandhaus orchestra and quartet in regular concerts and began publishing annotated chamber music editions at the same time, editions of chamber music by such as Alard or Franchomme began publication much later in France. Not until 1868 did there appear the Ecole classique concertante, consisting of editions by Alard, Franchomme and the pianist Diémer of the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven for violin, cello and piano; Louis Diémer played regularly with Alard and Franchomme in the concerts of the Societé Alard Franchomme (Josephine White, ‘The Violinist José White in Paris, 1855-1875’, Black Music Research Journal, 10 (1980), p. 226.). However, although this is the first such collection to be edited by a group of performers who played together frequently (as opposed to being edited by a single individual), it is extremely lightly edited, with few performing annotations; editions of chamber music where each part is edited by a player of that instrument do not appear until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. Hugo Dechert edited the cello parts of Joachim’s edition of the Beethoven quartets, and of the selected Haydn quartets edited by Moser. Hugo Becker edited the cello parts of Moser’s edition of the Mozart and Schubert quartets, and Edgar Wollgandt, Carl Herrmann, and Julius Klengel edited the Brahms Clarinet Quintet for Peters in 1925. In the Mozart quartets, Becker’s cello parts are edited in much less detail than Moser’s violin parts, but this partly reflects the greater complexity of the latter. (Discussion of Alard’s Les maîtres classiques). Alard’s Observations générales appear to offer, not different styles, but ‘le style’. Something similar may apply in the case of Joseph Hellmesberger’s editions ‘avec la mode moderne pour le coup d’archet’ published by Cranz (a series including works by Spohr, Mendelssohn, Rode, Paganini, Viotti, and others). Comparing Hellmesberger’s edition of Spohr’s concerto no. 7 with the original, Hellmesberger clarifies bowing and fingering in more detail than Spohr. The extra details of bowing such as the clear up-bow marking from the ascending scale (figure 10, bar 3), the two bows marked for the trills in the 4th and 12th bars after letter C, the systematic bowing of the passage from the upbeat to the 17th bar of C (inconsistent in the original) and the tendency to indicate bow direction on successive slurs where the bowing would appear to be self-evident, all suggest that the ‘mode moderne’ is a modern manner of notation rather than performance. Hellmesberger’s fingerings agree quite closely with David’s, but his bowings often break up Spohr’s longer slurs which David, ‘Nach der Tradition des Componisten’, retains. The claim for modernity in these editions is strikingly at odds with those earlier editions validated by claiming some form of contact with the composer. With many German publications, title pages combined French and German text. Thus, David’s Haydn trios: Trios für Klavier, Violine und Violoncell : Sonates pour le pianoforte avec accompagnement de violon et de violoncelle. [...] von Joseph Haydn. But with some repertoire, title pages appear to have been issued separately in French and German. Two versions of David’s edition of Beethoven’s violin sonatas were published by Peters, one (plate 4899) with a German title, the other (plate 4926) with a French one. At least in the earlier 19th century, Breitkopf & Härtel’s title pages were usually given in French. In general, it appears that at this time the use of Romance languages such as French or Italian denoted international circulation, whereas English or German were used for items intended for more local consumption (David Wyn Jones, ‘What Do Surviving Copies of Printed Music tell Us?’, in Rasch (ed.), op. cit., vol. 2, p. 145.). 

With some works, the almost simultaneous publication of competing editions by different publishers shows the different ways in which they tried to capture some market share. It is striking that Dotzauer’s edition of the Bach cello suites was reissued by Breitkopf & Härtel early in 1866, only a few months before Friedrich Grützmacher’s highly elaborated and recomposed edition for Peters, which was itself closely followed by Grützmacher’s more restrained edition (also for Peters). The three editions of Mendelssohn’s cello sonatas published in late 1877/early 1878 by Peters (F. Grützmacher), Pohle (Cossmann) and Litolff (L. Grützmacher) are all priced differently, printed on different numbers of pages, differ significantly in the amount, and type, of performance annotation, and use editors with different reputations and public profile. In 1901/1902 both Breitkopf and Peters published revised versions of David’s Hohe Schule, edited by H. Petri and F. Hermann respectively. In general these editions retained David’s articulation marks, but Hermann’s gave fewer fingerings, while Petri’s gave additional information about where to stop the bow, and where to hold down a fifth across the strings, or keep a finger down. The editions of Kreutzer’s Etudes by Hermann (Peters, mid-1893) and Singer (Schirmer, 1894) also show publishers in competition, and once again Singer gives more detailed annotation than Hermann; he also offers many more bowing variants for the second study including saltato and the on-string staccato stroke. The set of six Spohr violin concertos nos. 2, 6—9, and 11, published by Peters edited by David (with Friedrich Hermann’s accompaniments) ‘nach der Tradition den Componisten’, reappeared in new editions by Leopold Auer (Litolff) and Hans Sitt (Breitkopf) almost simultaneously in early 1890. 

While many of these annotated editions offered a degree of revision, correction, and the addition of exact markings of fingering and bowing, the term ‘performing edition’ is chiefly used in English printed music in connection with cheap editions of the major choral works. Sir George MacFarren’s forthcoming series of such editions, published by the London Music Publishing Company, was announced in early 1884, and Messiah appeared in May that year (Musical Standard, 26 (1884) p.12; ‘Notes On News’, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review,7 (1884) p.213. Messiah was first reviewed in ‘Recent Music’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 57 (1884), p.624.). These editions attempted to solve practical performance difficulties and reflected MacFarren’s own preferences; they are now, therefore, documents of later 19th-century performance practices of the standard Victorian choral repertoire. While the publication of edited texts of string music continued, there was a general tendency in the post-David period to give less annotation, other than in overtly pedagogical works. The older style of detailed annotation that continued to be practiced by Friedrich Grützmacher (in, for instance, the concertos in his Hohe Schule collection of 1891) looks increasingly out of date when compared with, for example, the editions of baroque sonatas by Piatti and Schroeder, let alone Haussmann’s quite austere edition of the Bach solo cello Suites. 

In the context of the increasing tendency towards producing more textually authoritative editions, performing editors took greater care to distinguish their annotations from the original, and in general annotated rather less. Joachim’s view of over-edited texts may be extreme, but it is not wholly untypical (this preface is attributed to Moser, but it almost certainly represents Joachim’s views): 

The modern practice, therefore, of ‘editing’ recognised classical and standard works cannot be too severely condemned as Vandalism. (…) Spohr (…) has especially suffered much from this mania for editing. Partly from an utter lack of knowledge regarding certain peculiarities in his style of composition and treatment of the violin, and partly in order that the amateur might be enabled to reach the grapes which otherwise hung too high for him, the sacrilege with respect to Spohr’s works has arrived at such a pitch as to call for the strongest protest. (Joseph Joachim and Andreas Moser, trans. Alfred Moffatt, Violinschule vol. 3 (Berlin: Simrock, 1905), p. 10). 

Although listings in Hofmeister continue to give annotating editors’ names taken from the title page information, publishers’ advertisements often do not make this aspect a feature. Thus, in a three-quarter page advertisement for Breitkopf & Härtel’s publications in the Musikalische Wochenblatt for 1899, which gives the arranger’s name in the case of transcriptions, no editor’s name is included for works such as Beethoven’s Cello Sonata op. 69, or the Largo from Chopin’s Cello Sonata op. 65. But the continued circulation of older, more heavily annotated, texts should not be underestimated. Players at the turn of the century had a wider choice than ever before of editions of the standard string repertoire, and new publishers continued to use the name of a famous player-editor as a marketing opportunity. When Universal began to create its catalogue in 1901 it very soon published Mendelssohn’s cello sonatas edited by David Popper. This was clearly a commercial decision – Popper was the most famous cello virtuoso of his day, and this was to be his only annotated edition of another composer’s work. Universal’s series of quartets edited by the Hellmesberger Quartet, or of other violin works edited by Josef Hellmesberger, were clearly produced as competition for German editions such as Peters’ series of Beethoven quartets edited by Joachim and Moser. In the later nineteenth century, anthologies of shorter pieces also began to appear, such as those edited by Joachim, Wilhelmj, or Pollitzer, where the editor’s name was given greater prominence than that of any composer’s. In the earlier twentieth century, Augener published several editions of string music which claimed to be edited by Ferdinand David, although these editions bore little resemblance to David’s published texts.

[GK]