Conference Agenda

In 1783, the Helvetic Society printed the first volume of their Swiss Museum, a semi-regular publication intended to promote Swiss history and culture. Over the next seven years, Society members submitted their own contributions, and the Museum ballooned to more than 6,700 pages. Musical scores and verse, mostly by now-obscure amateurs, were printed alongside items like biographies, insider jokes, and travel reports. Historians (Im Hof and Capitani, 1983) have considered the Museum within Swiss politics and the Enlightenment, but the Museum remains unplumbed by musicologists. I argue the music in the Museum is rich source for the very reasons it may have been neglected: massive scope, varied amateur contributors, and a deliberately peripheral relationship to urban centers. We can use the Museum not only to better understand Swiss amateur music making, but also interrogate how late eighteenth-century periodicals and text anthologies operated as collaborative musical spaces.
This paper offers an initial overview of the Swiss Museum as a musicological source. First, I overview the structure, contents, and historical moment of the Swiss Museum, and situate it in the context of eighteenth-century anthologies and social reading habits. The Museum contains more music than initially meets the eye: much of the verse was intended to be sung, and the music frequently references, critiques, or lauds other pieces in the Society's larger publishing milieu. Second, I offer a brief case study to demonstrate how the Museum can enrich current lines of enquiry. I show how the natural sublime (Stanyon 2021, Abedinifard 2023) appears in song submissions across the lifespan of the Museum and the ways in which these songs reference other publications by the Society. Contrasting with many discussions of the sublime, which often exist in the abstract, composers in the Museum applied the sublime to specific topics, like nation building, antiquity, and gender roles. The Swiss Museum shows how amateurs used music and musical verse to negotiate ideals that would go on to influence wider European culture in the following century.

In 1838, Franz Liszt and Henri-Louis-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine performed Johann Peter Pixis’s Variations brillants sur un théme original, Op. 112, in Milan. The success of the concert led Simon Richault to republish the work that same year, "augmented with a cadenza by Liszt” (“augmentés du Point d’Orgue par Liszt”). By connecting concert repertoire to his musical catalogue, Richault deliberately foregrounded the performer in a way that would prove prescient of the celebrity culture that would dominate European musical arenas in the coming decade. Yet while Liszt’s fame may have helped popularize this practice, other musicians, such as Wilhelm Ernst and Hans von Bülow, also benefited from similar editorial privilege during the nineteenth century.

These performer-centric editions increasingly stood apart from the two dominant editorial practices that characterized the second half of the century. Source-critical editions sought to present music “as intended by” its composer—often dead for decades, if not centuries—thus simultaneously revealing and fixing an authoritative reading that performers were expected to follow reverentially. By contrast, instructive editions of these same works often followed an “as prescribed by” approach, in which contemporary teachers established precepts for how a work should sound, thereby shaping performance norms for the future. Performer-centric editions, however, offered a third approach: the “as played by” model. Rather than aspiring to historical authenticity or pedagogical instruction, these editions sought to capture the ephemeral artistry of a specific performer’s unique interpretation.

By employing musical notation instead of textual commentary, performer-centric editions allowed audiences to recreate—in extraordinary detail—musical events that they might never have witnessed, thereby bridging previously intractable gaps between the ephemeral performance, its physical preservation, and unreliable, prejudiced, or ambiguous recollections. For players of “as played by” editions, the payoff could be even more personal, since such editions offered the potential to become the virtuoso, to fully embody the very celebrity that nineteenth-century material culture had made as ubiquitous as it was inaccessible. These ephemeral inscriptions solved such a paradox, bringing together performer and composer in ways unmatched by any other contemporary communicative medium or discourse network.

April 1833 saw the publication of London’s first guitar-focused magazine dedicated to Italian-born guitarist-composer, Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829). The Giulianiad (1833–1835) is both a historical oddity and informative snapshot of the legacy of Giuliani’s career in a city where he is not known to have performed. With its abundance of beginner-friendly guitar music, the magazine’s primary mission was to provide accessible material for aspiring guitarists to play at home; however, with letters to the editor, poems, opinion pieces in defense of the guitar, concert reviews, and updates on London’s musical culture and events, the magazine also represents a microcosm of the less mainstream musical narratives surrounding the guitar.

This paper will explore how the short-lived Giulianiad shaped Giuliani’s posthumous reception in London vis-a-vis a growing community of domestic solo guitarists, many of whom were women. Aside from celebrating Giuliani as a performer, The Giulianiad also served as a didactic tool. The magazine’s capacity to help its readers strive for Giuliani’s quality of playing was not lost on its membership, some of whom—by means of letters to the editor—attempted to use it as an open forum to influence the way the community learned the guitar. These letters positioned soloistic styles of playing as worthwhile artistic pursuits, while criticizing seemingly simplistic accompanimental guitar playing.

While the 1830s are often regarded as a period of decline for the guitar (Heck 2013; Page, Sparks, and Westbrook 2023), I would like to expand the way this phenomenon is understood by examining how the role of the guitar changed in more private music-making spheres. By analyzing issues of The Giulianiad amidst the backdrop of Christopher Page’s recent work on the guitar in Georgian England (2020) and well as Erik Stenstadvold’s research on teaching and learning the guitar in the nineteenth century (2023), I argue that The Giulianiad provided a vehicle for a new kind of domestic life for the guitar, one focused on autodidacticism and the idea that any at-home guitarist could set aside simple accompaniment to pursue Giuliani’s distinct soloistic style instead.

By 1830, the previously-common practice of publishing string quartets in sets of three or six under a single opus number had all but disappeared. In this paper, I propose that the discontinuation of multi-work opus publishing was related to the changing social and economic structures in Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century, particularly the decline of the aristocratic salon in conjunction with the increase in ticketed, professional performances of chamber music. Evidence of the disappearance of the multi-work opus is found in the oeuvre of composers both renowned (Ludwig van Beethoven’s final set of three quartets was published in 1808) and lesser-known (Franz Weiss’ in 1814 and George Onslow’s in 1828). Nevertheless, a few mid-nineteenth-century composers still wrote and published multi-work string quartet opuses. Following the idea that works grouped in a single opus number exist in conversation with one another (Sisman 2008), I suggest that comprehending the rhetoric of a multi-work opus requires a particular mode of listening based on attention, repetition, and discourse. This type of listening was most practicable in semi-private, sociable settings like the Enlightenment-era aristocratic salon, but found continued relevance as a mode of historical listening in the later nineteenth century.

I posit that the composers who persisted in publishing string quartets as multi-work opuses through the middle of the nineteenth century continued a practice of “sociable” or “private” chamber music, exhorting their audiences to a mode of historical listening: the apprehension of rhetoric and creation of rich meaning among works within an opus. Those unusual chamber works that were published as part of a set after 1830 therefore invite special interpretation. I consider two sets of string quartets – Felix Mendelssohn’s op. 44 (1839) and Johannes Brahms’s op. 51 (1873) – in light of their status as later multi-work opuses. Significantly, much scholarship on these works includes debate about their perceived progressive or regressive stylistic qualities (Sumner Lott 2015; Taylor 2021). Considering Mendelssohn’s op. 44 and Brahms’ op. 51 as multi-work opuses and engaging in this historical listening allows scholars, performers, and audiences to productively problematize and transcend the progressive/regressive binary.