Conference Agenda

During his retirement in Paris, Gioachino Rossini composed several hundred small-scale pieces that he confined to private performance. Despite repeated attempts to publish them in the decades following his death in 1868, these Péchés de vieillesse remained largely unavailable to the public.

This paper examines one telling episode in their turbulent publication history, drawing on unexplored archives of legal, commercial, and bureaucratic negotiations. Focusing on the Heugel firm’s acquisition and eventual publication of Quelques riens pour album—a set of twenty‐four piano pieces—this case study reveals the fraught intersection of aesthetic and commercial values under the practical constraints of the publishing business. Correspondence between representatives of the Société Anonyme de Publications Périodiques—a French publishing corporation—the music publisher Heugel, and a London legal firm reveals the exigencies of a complex commercial system and the often colorful personalities involved. Taken together, these archival records of the administrative apparatus behind nineteenth-century music publishing indicate how a complex international web of territorial sale restrictions, overseas shipping, and cross-border financing affected publishers’ strategies in bringing music to the public.

Preserved copies of the editors’ manuscripts show how the music was reshaped by editorial intervention: scores were cut, retitled, and bundled into fascicles with little concern for Rossini’s original intentions. Faced with the sheer volume of pieces, stakeholders treated the collection more as a wholesale commodity than an aesthetic object. The London sellers set a flat rate per page, prompting the French buyer to select only “the most interesting” ones and dismiss the rest as “not worth the price of engraving.” Even after the first publication in 1880, sales remained meager, reprints stalled, and major institutions like the Conservatoire never received copies. Created outside of a familiar performance context, Rossini’s late compositions are as difficult to assimilate into modern scholarship as they were for their original purveyors to publicize. Rather than redeeming a set of neglected masterpieces, this paper focuses on the tensions and frictions that emerge in a case of commercial and artistic failure. Easy to overlook, such mishaps shed light on the incentives and obstacles at play in the vast network of industrialized musical culture.

For nineteenth-century composers, choices about in which opera house to premiere a work, in which language to commission a libretto, and in which country to publish a score were not merely artistic or logistical concerns—they were undergirded by financial and legal imperatives that fundamentally shaped both creative practice and their long-term livelihood. New intellectual property protections for music, a growing middle class eager to consume art music, and increased ease of international travel transformed the economics of composition. These shifts enabled composers to move beyond reliance on aristocratic patronage and instead forced them to navigate a world in which they themselves had legal and political agency to complement their artistic drive.

This paper revises the narrative of the rise of the bourgeois composer—one who, in contrast to the previous century’s court composers, strategically leveraged legal and commercial mechanisms to sustain a career. Composers replaced lump-sum commission payments with recurring performance royalties; licensed their most popular arias for instrumental transcriptions rather than giving them gratis to any hearer who could transcribe them; and carefully timed premieres and publications to maximize their legal protections. These strategic decisions not only safeguarded composers from piracy but also reshaped how music was created, distributed, and consumed. The legal regimes allowing for this shift changed the ontological status of music from something ethereal to something concrete and commodifiable.

Centered around underutilized archival sources, including correspondence from composers, such as Vincenzo Bellini and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to institutions, such as international publishing houses and performance venues, this paper reconstructs how composers actively engaged with their international artistic communities as intellectual property generators. Letters debating where to premiere a work or whether to publish a Paris edition before a Berlin one reveal the deep and often inseparable entanglement of legal strategy with questions of national identity and artistic ambition. By foregrounding intellectual property rights in composers’ lived experiences, this paper highlights the legal and cultural forces shaping nineteenth-century western art music. It challenges the received narrative of the Romantic creative genius and recognizes the human complexity undergirding music-making in the age of capitalism.

Translation was central to the printing and global proliferation of musical commodities in nineteenth-century London. British consumers expected to purchase, hear, and sing foreign songs with English words. Publishers flooded the market with songs in English translation, enabled by copyright laws that permitted them to translate and republish work already published abroad. Many also negotiated contracts with foreign composers to secure exclusive British copyright, making sure that the London edition was published before any others. Beethoven’s popular setting of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land”, for example, was therefore first published in London as “Know’st thou the Land”. In the decades that followed, however, five additional publishers registered their editions of the same song at Stationers’ Hall—each with its own translation—also establishing copyright in the British dominions. Why were so many publishers able to claim the same song as their intellectual property?

In this paper, I propose that the creation of new translations offered London publishers a way to claim copyright over previously copyrighted foreign music. As the courts deliberated on the common law rights of foreign authors and composers versus the utilitarian and statutory protection of British industry (Kretschmer & Kawohl 2004), translations occupied a legal gray area (Bellos 2024). They allowed publishers to claim songs as the product of British intellectual labor even when publishers had no official ownership of the composer’s music. I argue that song translation was therefore an extension of the practice of “Englishing” (Wheelock 1990): a way of assimilating the music of foreign composers as British property through adapting existing music to new English texts that appealed to British tastes. This practice necessitated the ontological and legal separation of words and music in song, subverting its originary unity associated with the Romantic work concept. The plural authorship and property of translated songs similarly complicates originality as a foundational principle of British and US music copyright law (Leo 2024). Rather than protecting “original” works, London music publishers leveraged the uncertainties in British copyright law to protect what they had made their corporate property, prefiguring the capitalist music copyright practices of today’s global music industry.