J.S. Bach, the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-Century Music Trade.
Krummel, D.W.
Edited by George B. Stauffer. (Bach Perspectives, 2.) Lincoln, Neb.:
University of Nebraska Press, 1996. [xv, 219 p. ISBN 0-8032-1044-2.
$55.]
When and how did music publishing become a specialty in its own
right, separate from music printing and music retailing? The event is
easier to understand than it is to date; and once it is understood, the
new divisions of labor that resulted look more like effects than causes.
Music publishers still needed to know both printing and retailing,
perhaps even do some of either. The music in the catalog, however, was
now the main goal, the reason for being music publishers in the first
place. It is good when success stories can remind us of this: firms of
distinction, working with music of consequence.
Through history, few music publishers make this point better than the
Breitkopf lineage. Its activities are superimposed on another great
Leipzig lineage, the Bach family, so as to offer the occasion for a
scholarly anthology of cases in point. The two Johanns are clearly the
giants in each family. For this volume, Gregory Butler focuses on the
important Breitkopf imprint during Johann Sebastian Bach's
lifetime, the 1736 Schemelli songbook, while Ernest May summarizes the
details of his overall presence in the Breitkopf world. Soon after
Bach's death in 1750, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf was to
develop his new music-printing type and conceive his music-manuscript
distribution scheme, for which he prepared his famous thematic and
nonthematic catalogs. Yoshitake Kobayashi and George Hill undertake to
find and explain the extant manuscript copies. While the catalogs are a
treasure to be thankful for, they are still confusing because we expect
them to be more than sales lists. Kobayashi, Andreas Glockner,
Hans-Joachim Schulze, and Robert Cammarota, in particular, explore the
ways in which they raise more questions than they settle. The new
evidence they invoke is still important in its own right.
The Breitkopfs' vision confidently assumed their awareness of
the workings of the music world. In dealings with musicians who knew how
to do business, they could recede into the background, as instanced in
Peggy Daub's discussion of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's
subscription lists. On the other hand, Neal Zaslaw, a Mozartean intruder
in the Bach festivities, ends his brief essay by throwing a bomb instead
at Breitkopf. Leopold Mozart may have been a typical Breitkopf composer,
but Wolfgang was rather too good for them: the Breitkopfs "were
businessmen first and musical connoisseurs second" (p. 89). A
lovely fight might have ensued had there been a few Breitkopfs around to
defend themselves. While the general musical public of the late
eighteenth century gets stuck with the blame, it too might have whined
that Breitkopf had helped degrade it with vacuous Hausmusik. In
imbroglios like these, music publishers are understandably happy to back
up into their earlier roles as printers and retailers.
Ortrun Landmann avoids the battles by discussing the Breitkopf
holdings at the Saxon state library in Dresden, as she reminds us how
many diverse kinds of documents Breitkopf was involved in, while George
B. Stauffer, who as editor has tied together the whole collection, takes
the assembled guests on a tour of the firm's "zum Goldenen
Baren" residence. Most of the papers in this handsome book were
originally read at international conferences, now published for the use
of those who could not be there, or were there but too rushed to think
through the detailed arguments at the oral presentations. It is nice
that the Breitkopfs could host the show, even if they are reluctant to
take us into their wine cellar of trade secrets.
D. W. KRUMMEL University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
