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Article Excerpt
At the start of the seventeenth century, ambitious musicians in Lutheran lands were keen to have their music printed and published. To be in print was a way of making a public reputation, which could lead to professional mobility and advancement. Thus Johann Hermann Schein, who was Thomaskantor in Leipzig between 1616 and 1630, declared in 1617 that he would publish books of his sacred and secular music in alternation, and in the next decade he brought out twelve such collections. Michael Praetorius, composer a the Wolfenbuttel court, was even more productive, seeing twenty-two large books into print between 1605 and 1619. Numerous pieces were also printed in pamphlets for weddings, funerals, and other ceremonies: Schein had over a hundred such occasional pamphlets to his name.
Despite the evident significance of German music printers in the period, they have been little studied, in contrast to the attention that has been lavished on Italian firms of the sixteenth century. One reason for such neglect is that there were no large printers that could form the focus for research, in the way that Gardano and Scotto have for studies of Italian music printing; the only German firm of comparable size was perhaps the Gerlach--Kauffmann dynasty in Nuremberg. (1) On the whole, German music was printed by nonspecialist firms who produced a handful of music editions among numerous other titles. The music trade was decentralized, with most firms catering to local composers and buyers; it is hence best studied by examining all the printers in a particular town or region.
The present article focuses on the music printers of Leipzig between 1590 and 1660. This period was dominated by the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), which significantly disrupted the city's economic and cultural life. Yet despite such vicissitudes, throughout the first half of the seventeenth century Leipzig produced about a tenth of all printed music in German-speaking lands. (2) Although the city had only about 15,000 inhabitants, it was renowned as a center for both trade and learning. It stood at the junction of trade routes from northwest Europe, from eastern Europe, and from southern Germany and Italy; it was particularly important as a trading gateway to the expanding markets of Bohemia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Silesia. Three trade fairs were held each year (at New Year, shortly after Easter, and at Michaelmas), and by the end of the seventeenth century these fairs had grown to be bigger even than those at Frankfurt am Main. Alongside this mercantile activity, the university attracted students from Protestant territories across northern Europe and trained the elite that would become the future administrators, educators, lawyers, and pastors of Saxony. The combination of trading and learned communities gave Leipzig a rich musical life; its local musicians included leading composers of the day, notably Johann Hermann Schein and Johann Rosenmuller, and there were also strong links with musicians at Dresden such as Heinrich Schutz. (3)
Leipzig was a major center of the book trade. Booksellers met at the trade fairs to exchange stock and settle accounts, and by the 1590s there were formal book fairs running at both Easter and Michaelmas. Some of the dealers were Leipzig residents, such as Henning Grosse and his family, while many others visited from towns across the German-speaking lands. The city was the pivot in the distribution network of books to central and eastern Europe, and the local authorities tolerated Protestant titles that tended to be censored at the other German book fair of Frankfurt am Main. From Michaelmas 1594 each book fair was accompanied by a catalog listing the stock that could be bought or ordered there. The catalogs included many books from Leipzig, titles from other German cities such as Nuremberg and Frankfurt am Main, and numerous foreign books. Music merited its own section in the catalogs, including imports from Antwerp and partbook sets from other regions of Germany. (4)
The music printed in Leipzig, however, was aimed at a more provincial market than that represented at the fairs. Most of it was by local composers such as Erhard Bodenschatz, Sethus Calvisius, Johann Hermann Schein, or Tobias Michael, and some of it was specific to the musical preferences or liturgical requirements of the area. Although the books by Schein and Calvisius were vigorously advertised at the book fairs, their main market consisted of the churches and schools of Saxony and Thuringia; few copies were owned by institutions as far afield as Luneburg or Lubeck. Hymnals such as Schein's Cantional (1627) often indicated on their title pages that they were for use in the jurisdiction of electoral Saxony. As for the hundreds of occasional pamphlets that were printed in Leipzig, almost all were for private distribution among friends and colleagues.
There was no such thing in Leipzig as a printer who specialized solely in music, as in the manner of Gardano in Venice. Most of the city's numerous printers produced some music at some stage in their working lives, if only perhaps hymnals or pamphlets. This arrangement seems to reflect the role of music in Lutheran society: pervasive but often at a relatively basic level of expertise, without the circles of connoisseurs such as collected madrigal books in Italy. It is relatively uninformative to list the output and biography of the Leipzig printers individually. (5) Instead, the present article asks wider questions to elucidate the place of music in the Lutheran book trade. How much music was issued, and did printers specialize in particular genres? Can archival and typographic evidence reveal the equipment and expertise possessed by different firms? And how much did printed music cost, and in what print runs were music editions issued?
GENRES OF PRINTED MUSIC
Printed music from Leipzig in the period 1590-1660 can be divided into four categories: partbook collections, hymnals, treatises, and occasional pamphlets (those produced for a specific occasion such as a baptism, wedding, or funeral). This taxonomy is of my own devising but is based on criteria that seventeenth-century musicians would have recognized, such as the format, musical contents, and commercial basis of a book. A description of the four categories is a useful way to introduce the output of the Leipzig printers.
Partbook Collections
Partbook is the format for which there is a book for each performing part. It was used for polyphony and hence was the specialist format for music; partbook collections were usually advertised under the heading of "Libri musici" in the book-fair catalogs. A typical partbook collection from Leipzig contained about fifteen to twenty-five pieces, although some books were larger. The contents might be motets, as in the weighty anthologies edited by Erhard Bodenschatz, Florilegium selectissimarum cantionum (1603, 2d ed. 1621) and Florilegium portense (1618). Volumes of secular music also appeared, including partsongs such as Balthasar Fritsch's Newe deutsche Gesange (1608) and the three books of Schein's Musica boscareccia (1621, 1626, 1628), as well as collections of instrumental dances by Schein, Valerius Otto, Georg Engelmann, Samuel Michael, and Johann Rosenmuller.
The Lutheran market for partbook collections included a range of amateur and professional musicians. Many schools were obliged to supply the music at the neighboring church, and hence had to invest in printed sets of motets for the pupils to sing. Sometimes church music was also undertaken by a Kantorei, which consisted of a mix of boys, teachers, professional musicians, and amateurs. The emphasis on music in schools created a class of musically competent and musically literate amateurs; many members of this class also cultivated secular repertories in their homes or at convivial gatherings. Printed music was preferred to manuscript, partly because there was widespread demand from churches and schools, and partly because many of the performers were amateurs who lacked the prestige or professional stature to acquire scribal copies.
Hymnbooks
Hymnals and devotional songbooks constituted the most widespread category of printed music and the one with the biggest market. Almost every printer and publisher produced at least one or two such titles. These books, bringing congregational and devotional song to the people, were sometimes comprehensible to those without a musical education and often had close links with nonmusical books. In the book-fair catalogs and the inventories of many libraries of the time, they were usually listed among other religious or devotional books.
Some hymnals were official repositories of the congregational songs for the church year. This repertory had ossified after the first few decades of the Reformation, partly because the church authorities tried to impose conformity on chorale singing and discouraged the use of newly written hymns. Even as late as 1624 the Saxon authorities forbade congregations from singing anything other than thirty-two chorales dating from the sixteenth century. (6) Hence the hymnals produced in Leipzig during the 1620s often contained a similar repertory to those of fifty years earlier, and always laid great emphasis on chorales by Martin Luther. In Schein's Cantional (1627), for instance, the title page was emblazoned with Luther's name and also asserted the book's adherence to the Augsburg Confession (the 1530 formulation of Lutheran doctrine). Sometimes these hymnbooks were promulgated by official command (as with the 1661 edition of Schutz's Becker Psalter), and some schools might buy copies in bulk for the pupils. (7) Increasingly, members of the congregation also purchased their own copies to take to services and use at home. (8) The hymnals could act as compact spiritual companions, with several indexes allowing a reader to find a song that was apt for the day.
Other books contained devotional songs for domestic rather than liturgical use. These books included a higher proportion of newly written poetry, such as metrical paraphrases of the psalms by Cornelius Becker or Martin Opitz. The music might be on a specifically chamber scale, as with the continuo arias in Johann Frentzel's Zehen andachtige Buss-Gesange (2d ed., 1655). Some of the devotional songbooks included prayers and woodcuts to help the believer act piously throughout the day, and many surviving copies bear frequent annotations that testify to personal use. (9)
Because of their potential personal uses, most hymnbooks had a small page-size such as octavo or duodecimo. In his Psalmodia nova (1630) Joseph Clauder extolled the advantages of the duodecimo format, saying that it allowed the book "to be used by every class of person, to be taken on journeys,...
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