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Article Excerpt
The year is 1867 in Paris during the Second Empire. A musician sets off one day from his flat in a building several centuries old situated on the north side of the city. He is mulling over finances, and he feels lucky to have the place. Though the building is six floors tall with a narrow spiral staircase, the ground floor apartment was available when he was looking, and the piano movers were just able to shoehorn in his forty-year-old Erard piano.
He has a package under his arm, and he is on a mission, but he pauses upon emerging from his narrow street onto the great boulevard. He glances up at the magnificent arch dividing the boulevard at Porte St. Denis and then heads west toward the Opera where he is employed as an opera coach. As he walks, his mind turns to finances. Some calculation in his head divides his monthly salary. Almost three-quarters goes toward food and another quarter to his apartment, fuel, and clothes, leaving little for everything else. (1) The scores that he deeply desires cost around fifteen francs, too much for him to spend in his quest to keep up with the latest operas.
A fellow musician is visiting tonight, as he does weekly, so they can play and sing some opera music. They are hoping to work through a piano-vocal score they had seen advertised in a recent edition of Le menestrel, (2) Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, which had been first performed last November. Some music, some gossip and good fellowship--that is his hope for the evening.
He continues down the boulevard, glances in the patisserie, passes the butcher, and turns in at his goal, the shop of Leon Grus. Grus has an especially lovely shop, and well-placed. (3) He sells pianos and scores, a few other instruments, and sundries, such as candles and music paper. The musician bypasses the displays, though, and heads to the end of the counter. Here is the abonnement de musique, the music circulating library, where he has been a member since before the old man died and his son took over. Last month he paid his annual subscription of thirty francs, and this enables him to borrow three scores per week, which he does regularly, like clockwork. The proprietor chats with him, and the man hands him the package he has been carrying. Grus glances quickly through the scores, but he knows his customer and knows that there will be no missing pages or penciled markings in the scores being returned. The musician is happy to hear that Grus has just received in his shop several piano-vocal scores of the Thomas opera, and the proprietor quickly prepares one for the abonnement--placing a sticker on the front cover and preparing a checkout card for his files.
The man makes several other choices for the week and then exits the shop, continuing on his way to give a piano lesson to the daughter of a petty official. If the girl's parents think an ability to play piano will help her on the marriage market, so much the better, because the girl actually has some talent and is a diligent student. Her parents took his suggestion to present her with a subscription to a music circulating library as an etrenne, or New Year's gift, and she has been spending time sight-reading the scores she borrows.
The abonnements de musique as characterized in the preceding scenario, also known as cabinets de lectures musicals, or, in English, music circulating libraries, were businesses that loaned music scores to subscribers. In France the life span of the institution was roughly a century and a half, from the end of the eighteenth century until the 1950s. In this article we describe the businesses as they existed in France, give some ideas about their patronage, and present a preliminary list of firms. We will see that music circulating libraries illustrate the functional nature of business, where a new enterprise can spring up to fill a need in the marketplace and then fade away when no longer needed. We also infer that these libraries played a significant role in the dissemination of music, allowing people to rent music which they could not afford to buy.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Michel Brenet, writing in 1906, (4) noted that the history of French circulating libraries for music was then almost entirely unknown. A century later, this is still mostly true for the French businesses. The history is more complete for German, English, and Norwegian libraries. In 1998, Tobias Widmaier's book on German Musikalienleihhandel clarified our understanding of such businesses in German-speaking countries. Widmaier, who offers detailed city-by-city research, is able to follow the growth and decline of German music circulating libraries. One revealing graph shows numbers of libraries in a parabola from only 39 libraries in 1840, through a high of 393 in 1890, and back to a low of 36 in 1925. (5) For the British Isles, Robin Alston examined all types of libraries in existence before 1850 and identified fifty-one music circulating libraries in Great Britain that opened between 1770 and 1845. (6) In addition, Alec Hyatt King's excellent article on the subject lists music circulating libraries identified from music catalogs, trade cards, trade sheets, and Humphries and Smith's Music Publishing in the British Isles. (7) For Norway, Dan Fog and Kari Michelsen in their book on Norwegian music publication note that: "It has been found advisable to mention the music hire libraries of the 19th century. Their importance can hardly be over-estimated. To the musical public of that time they were indispensable, and to the musicologist of today they mean an authentic and first-hand source of information as to the repertoire of times past." (8) Of the thirty-eight Norwegian publishers listed in the book, Fog and Michelsen note the presence of hire libraries in thirteen of the entries.
Hans Lenneberg in his article "Early Circulating Libraries and the Dissemination of Music" makes a case that "new compositions were published in editions too small to explain their rapid and widespread dissemination." (9) An example was Robert Schumann's piano work Kinderscenen, which was published in an edition of only 300 yet was widely known. Lenneberg suggests that music circulating libraries accelerated the dissemination of scores published in such small editions.
Circulating music libraries in France have not had a detailed examination. Though Americans ourselves, we have come to these French libraries because our library, the Music Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, holds the Rokahr Family Archive, a collection specializing in French opera scores of the nineteenth century. In the course of cataloging this collection, we noticed scores with stickers on the covers or with specially embossed covers (see fig. 1), indicating that the score had once been part of a music circulating library. Our involvement with these scores moved from mild curiosity to interest to concentrated attention.
To explore the issues affecting music circulating libraries, we will focus on business models from each of four time periods: the pioneers (late eighteenth century), the entrepreneur (1830s), the established businesses (mid-to late-nineteenth century), and the mega-businesses (twentieth century). We will then consider who might have used these libraries and why.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
THE PIONEERS: BUREAU D'ABONNEMENT MUSICAL
A vision for the first Parisian music circulating library came from two immigrants: a Belgian painter, Antoine de Peters, and an Italian violinist, Jean-Baptiste Miroglio. (10) An announcement for their venture, called the Bureau d'abonnement musical, first appeared in L'avant coureur on 22 July 1765:
Since music has become an almost general amusement, and since people of the highest rank find pleasure in it, nothing is more useful than a shop that has assembled all kinds of music from ancient to modern. Such is on offer at the business we are announcing today that will be opened the 22d of this month in the cour de l'ancien Grand-Cerf, rue des Deux-Portes-Saint-Sauveur at the home of Miroglio. The collection at the shop is most complete for instrumental and vocal music. One can find all the good French, Italian, and German pieces there, and new pieces are added daily. The subscription will be 24 livres per year, in exchange for which sum the subscriber can take whatever piece of music that they would like. For that purpose they will be provided with a catalog which will be updated every six months. The borrowing period is eight days. One will be able to get new scores when the old are returned in good shape. We believe that this establishment, which is run by people of taste, will contribute to the progress of art and will give the subscriber the pleasure of a varied repertoire. (11)
The eighteenth century adapted fluid, changing business models for all aspects of music commerce: printing, publishing, and sales. One model for selling music was quite informal. The composer would self-publish, send the music out to be engraved and printed, and then become his own distributor, selling the music from his home. Alternatively, it was the engraver or publisher who would take up the business of distribution from home or shop. Music was also occasionally sold at related businesses, such as instrument builders, stationers, or even candle makers. Music could find strange partners in the shop, as paper sellers sold "paper, ink, desks, pens, penknives, stamps, powders, Spanish waxes, seals, blank books and registers, portfolios, cardboard, [and] books ruled for music." (12) In this mix of business models, the dedicated music store was not the norm. The concept existed, though. Henri Foucault opened the first Parisian music store in the 1690s, followed much later in the 1720s by those of Boivin and Leclerc. (13) Despite these early attempts, the idea of a merchant specializing in music and related items was still just one of many models for music commerce at the end of the eighteenth century.
The inspiration for Peters's and Miroglio's Bureau probably came from more general circulating libraries. Variously called cabinets de lectures or salons de lectures, these were freestanding businesses offering books for loan for a subscription fee and also often providing a place to read periodicals and newspapers. The launch of such businesses was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The year sometimes quoted for the first circulating library in the British Isles is 1725, when Allan Ramsay opened a shop in Edinburgh. (14) Benjamin Franklin in the United States is credited with opening a similar establishment, the Philadelphia Library Company, in 1731. (15) In Paris one of the first opened in 1761. (16) Whereas booksellers first greeted these establishments with some alarm, fearing a diminishment of business as a result, they later became more sanguine. In 1813, T. N. Longman replied to the Copyright Committee (in England) when asked if the system of circulating libraries injured book trade: "I think the contrary. It tends to diffuse a taste for reading; having read a book, you have a desire to possess it, in many cases: besides that, the numerous societies which exist, each taking a copy creates a considerable demand." (17) The idea served the needs of the growing middle class, who were becoming more literate and increasing their consumption of printed materials.
The immediate result of Peters and Miroglio opening a circulating library dedicated to music was paranoia in the world of music publishing. The publisher Louis Balthazard de La Chevardiere instituted a suit soon after the Bureau opened in 1765, alleging harm to music publishers in the venture. He was joined by a long list of composers who feared for their profits. The suit seems to have waxed and waned and involved some countersuing. According to Michel Brenet's...
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