Musical Labor in the 19th Century

Since 1900, Berlin has occupied a position of international musical prominence, home to multiple orchestras, opera houses, conservatories, and venues for jazz, techno, experimental music, and musical theater.  Ironically, Berlin managed to sustain its musical life throughout some of the most challenging periods in its history, surviving two world wars, a failed democracy, a dictatorship, physical destruction, division, and reunification.  Attempts to explain how Berlin maintained its musical vitality throughout these turbulent times are further complicated by its failure to meet the standards for musical greatness upon which we typically rely: it was never able to rival Vienna, Leipzig, or even Mannheim as an incubator of compositional genius, nor did it benefit from reliable sources of financial support from benevolent rulers. Traditional music-historical approaches that privilege cities known for their iconic composers or long traditions of court or civic patronage fail to shed light on Berlin's unique situation.  Instead, we need to approach Berlin by considering how its musical achievements depended on another force, namely entrepreneurship. Unable to rely on sustainable patronage that could attract renowned musical innovators, this bleak garrison town instead gave rise to a diverse network of salons, amateur societies, military bands, for-profit ensembles, innovative subscription series, publishing houses, and talent agencies.  This entrepreneurial spirit built a firm foundation for Berlin's resilience that allowed the city's musical ventures to withstand the social, political, and economic turmoil of the twentieth century.
This paper, part of a larger project on twentieth-century Berlin as a music metropolis, looks to the enterprises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that contributed to making Berlin more of a leader in musical re-creation than in creation, rivaling all others in performance, education, popular entertainment, management, and distribution.  Frederick the Great's bold step to erect a free-standing opera house in 1742 stands out as a reminder of the monarch's preoccupation with music as both patron and creator, but also of his fleeting interest in the city's musical growth once he retreated to Potsdam shortly thereafter.  The absence of steady court patronage left room for the development of private concert societies, amateur choral groups (most notably the Singakademie), opera theaters, entertainment complexes, and conservatories, all of which came to compete with, and ultimately outpace, what the court could offer.  In 1848, Berlioz famously marveled at the ubiquity and diversity of Berlin's musical activity, and the loosening of theater regulations in 1869 opened the floodgates for commercial musical theater to proliferate. Berlin's future reputation as a music capital was secured with the establishment in 1882 of the city's most famous and enduring musical organization, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, itself created in the unique form of orchestra-as-corporation.  By tracing the complex interactions of production, consumption, demographics, public and private investment, technological advances, and tourism, we can begin to understand how the city's musical life could endure the perpetual cycle of construction, destruction, and renovation that the tewntieth century would bring. 

During his so-called exile in Paris (1839-1842), Richard Wagner supported himself and his wife by arranging operas by other composers for publisher Maurice Schlesinger. Such piecemeal labor in nineteenth-century music publishing has largely gone unstudied due to an absence of evidence. In the 1830s and 40s, operatic arranging was either quasi-anonymous work relegated to younger musicians, or the provenance of virtuoso fantasies and variations. While the latter repertory has received more scholarly attention of late (Davies, 2014; Kregor, 2010), the utilitarian task of producing piano reductions and other arrangements can prove difficult to document.

 Wagner's letters and autobiography provide important sources that have been hidden in plain sight. Often dismissed due to Wagner's notorious unreliability as a narrator, these documents nevertheless provide enough information (with some corroboration from related primary sources such as letters, diaries, and contracts from other composers) to reexamine some basic questions about the scope and nature of the music publishing industry.


My paper reassesses the documentation surrounding Wagner's work as a skilled laborer. Building on the foundation established by Mark Pottinger (2015)-who examined how this work may have impacted Wagner's later compositions-I consider here how the pay and timelines he reports can provide detailed information on the scope of Schlesinger's business. I focus specifically on his accounts of his work with Donizetti's _La Favorite_ (1840), Halévy's _La Reine de Chypre_ (1842), as well as his attempts to self-finance the publication of his setting of Heine's "Die beiden Grenadiere." The numbers he provides, when contextualized, give us a clear enough sense of the costs involved to estimate with greater confidence the relationship between print runs and financial solvency for a given score. These estimates-when considered alongside Schlesinger's full catalog-can provide a more accurate sense of the size and financial power of the music publishing world. More generally, this information may in turn help establish the foundations for further discussions of a labor theory of value in nineteenth-century music history.