Although losing more and more ground to German firms in the 1880s, the large French music publishing houses, such as Hartmann, Heugel, Choudens, and Durand, played a predominant role in French musical life by distributing all kinds of music, from the most popular to the most learned, as well as numerous adaptations and transcriptions, for example when an opera or a work was a huge success. Apart from those publishing houses that dominated the French market, the Parisian market was teeming with small publishers. Before being supported by Georges Hartmann in 1894, the young Debussy tried to have his works published by all sorts of publishers, from the most prestigious, such as Durand or Choudens, to the least known, such as Paul Dupont. Jacques Durand was a both a friend and business associate during the latter part of Debussy’s life, for he took over the publishing of Debussy’s music and helped him out in many ways. Their extensive correspondence is consequently revealing.

This chapter explores why, in an era so strongly associated with Beethoven and Schubert, Rossini’s music was such a hit in Vienna, looking at the contribution of opera in the home to this popularity. Opera arrangements spread Rossini’s music around a wide public even before public performances were staged. Hit numbers such as ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi were performed over and over in Vienna, in various venues and with various combinations of instruments and voices. The ‘judges of German art’ decried his work in newspaper reviews; but this did little or nothing to dampen the market’s enthusiasm. Sales of Rossini’s operas rocketed, as publishing catalogues from the era demonstrate. The popularity of Rossini, fuelled via opera arrangements, is linked to those aspects of Rossini’s music that the critics decried, especially repetition, noise, genre blurring, and theatricality. The thirst for arrangements that promoted and exacerbated these aspects is linked, in turn, to the context of surveillance and censorship in which the contemporary Viennese found themselves, and related to Habsburg politics and the Metternich System.

The Neapolitan string virtuosi who moved to Paris were among the protagonists of the early private and public concert series. The editorial success of Michele Mascitti – nephew and student of Pietro Marchitelli – is paradigmatic of the growing influence of the “public sphere”: revenues from his nine collections of sonatas allowed Mascitti to live for many years as a freelance musician while having a crucial part in the formation of a modern public. Together with Mascitti, Giovanni Antonio Guido, a student of Cailò in Naples, participated to the weekly soirées organized at the residence of the Crozat brothers in Paris. Guido’s presence at these splendid gatherings of the finest intellectuals and artists is attested by his portrait sketched by Antoine Watteau, also a protegé of the Crozat family, during one of these events. The aesthetic approach and performance practice imported in France by the Neapolitan string virtuosi became à la mode in the 1720s. The mixture of the Italian virtuosic approach with the French instrumental tradition that is found in the later sonatas by Mascitti and Guido was typical of the so-called goûts réunis, the “reunited tastes” of French and Italian music that would end up dominating the European scene in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

Music publishing historian William Arms Fisher asserted in 1933 that “The great music publishers were primarily great music-lovers.” Composer Amy Beach was fortunate to work with a dozen of these music-loving publishers during her career; among them were the leaders of several of America’s greatest houses, including Arthur P. Schmidt Company (Boston), G. Schirmer, Inc. (New York), Theodore Presser Company (Philadelphia), and Oliver Ditson Company (Boston). She knew many of her publishers personally, and their partnerships were rewarding and mutually beneficial. Beach’s compositions gained a wide public and provided a good income, and her publishers benefitted not only from estimable musical additions to their catalogues, but also by the fact that she was a woman and-equally important in the World War I era-an American. “Amy Beach and Her Publishers” examines Beach’s relationships with her publishers, as well as their commitment to publishing her music while also keeping an eye on customers’ wants and changing economic conditions.

Musical life in nineteenth-century Wales was characterised by the active dissemination of ideas through the publishing of original Welsh music and musical journals. The latter in particular sought to educate as well as to inform, at a time when formal musical education at college or conservatoire was not available. The growth of musical education in Wales was greatly assisted by the emergence of tonic sol-fa as a popular medium, which in turn supported the growth of congregational and choral singing. The chapter discusses the significance of these developments and the extent to which they fostered a Welsh musical tradition. The first part of the chapter considers the relationship between religion, music and education by examining a range of landmark publications, including Cyfaill mewn Llogell (1797). The second part examines the influence of the tonic sol-fa notation system and its popularity in Wales, considering how educational and religious aims coalesced with technological developments to embed the system in the popular musical culture of Welsh communities. It also considers the reasons why some musicians viewed the system negatively and saw it as limiting the progress of Welsh musical practice. The chapter concludes with a survey of music publishing and sales in Wales in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

An immense labour was involved before a composer’s music could reach its public. The journey from first thoughts to first night relied on the collaboration of many individuals operating in interlocking disciplines, and none were more important to that endeavour than music publishers and agents with the firm. In Britten’s case, the most important firms are Boosey & Hawkes and Faber & Faber. This chapter portrays those who worked closely with Britten as his publishers, who supported him and championed his music, including Ralph Hawkes, Erwin Stein, Hans W. Heinsheimer, Ernst Roth, Leslie Boosey, Anthony Gishford, and Donald Mitchell. Many of these individuals formed extremely close relationships with Britten, but equally, their associations were sometimes complex or fraught.

This chapter examines the different music and dance traditions that influenced the development of the Viennese waltz. Dance historians traditionally trace the origins of the waltz in the folk dancing of alpine Central Europe, viewing the rise of the Viennese waltz as a shift away from the cultural influence of the aristocracy in wider social dance practice. Yet the early waltz dances of the Viennese ballroom were shaped by influences that included French courtly dancing as well as Austrian folk music. The early history of the waltz is furthermore complicated by the fact that variants of the waltz dance did not always correspond with specific musical variants in the eighteenth-century ballroom. The development of the waltz highlights the complex network of influences that shaped social dance culture in the public ballrooms of Vienna.

This chapter examines the political, social and economic factors that shaped the early development of Vienna’s public ball culture from the time Joseph II opened the imperial ballrooms to the public in 1772. The number of public dancing venues in the city expanded rapidly in the decades around 1800, resulting in an increased influence of the middle classes over Viennese dance culture, and the rise of a new area of professional musical life. These developments gave dance orchestras a prominent position in Vienna’s musical landscape, and contributed to the emergence of new listening practices associated with dance music.

The story of Stravinsky’s relationships with music publishers is bound up with the political upheavals of the Russian Revolution and two world wars, as well as the copyright laws of countries in which Stravinsky lived and in which his works were published. In the course of his career, his works were published by a bewildering array of firms including M.P. Belaieff, P. Jurgenson, Édition Russe de musique, Adolphe Henn, J. & W. Chester, Éditions de la Sirène, B. Schotts Söhne, Associated Music Publishers, Leeds Music, Mercury Music Corporation, Charling Music, Edward B. Marks, Edwin Kalmus and Boosey & Hawkes. Stravinsky’s Le Faune et la Bergère (1906) was published by the Russian firm of Belaieff which had an office in Leipzig, its aim being to secure Western European copyrights for Russian composers (notably Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher). Although Fireworks was issued by the German firm of Schott in November 1909, most of the other works from Stravinsky’s early years up to and including The Firebird (1910) were issued by P. Jurgenson in Moscow. Founded in 1861, by 1900 it was much the largest music publisher in Russia and remained in the hands of the family until the firm was expropriated on Lenin’s orders in 1918, its catalogue forming the basis of the nationalised State Music Publishing House.

Viennese courtly Kapellen were in decline by the time Beethoven began his career as a symphonist, with the result that one of the most important contexts for eighteenth-century symphonies was no longer available to the young generation of composers. This decline, along with various other developments in Viennese musical life during Beethoven’s lifetime, led to a reconfiguration of the symphony’s role. Public, rather than private concerts became the main platform for symphonic performance in Vienna and abroad by 1800. The organisation of Vienna’s concert life meant that symphonies were increasingly conceived as grand, individualistic works, rather than routine household entertainment music. Furthermore, select members of the Viennese aristocracy, including some of Beethoven’s supporters, continued to cultivate symphonies, with the result that Beethoven was better placed than some of his contemporaries for securing the performance and subsequent publication of symphonies. This chapter contextualises Beethoven’s first three symphonies within the broader culture of symphonic composition and performance at the turn of the nineteenth century.