A Bibliographical Study of Antoine Meissonnier's Periodicals for Voice and Guitar, 1817-27

A salient feature of the growing music-publishing industry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the vast production of brief song sheets with simple accompaniment for piano, harp, or guitar. This fashion seems to have been particularly widespread among French publishers who produced such songs in the thousands for an apparently insatiable amateur market. The repertory, which mirrored the general bourgeois taste, consisted partly of arrangements of airs from the popular operas of the time, and partly of newly-composed romances, an extremely popular genre. Many publishers offered their commodities in series, often as a subscribable periodical ("Journal de musique") issued monthly, biweekly, or even weekly. Among the publishers producing song periodicals with guitar accompaniment, we find Baillon, Boüin, Bressler, Doisy, Cammand, Leduc, Lélu, Meissonnier, Momigny, Pacini, Porro, and Vidal.

This study focuses on the bibliographical aspects (that is, the systematic arrangement, not the contents) of three serial music publications or music periodicals predominantly containing songs with guitar accompaniment, edited and published by Antoine Meissonnier from 1811 to 1827: Journal de lyre ou guitare, La lyre des jeunes demoiselles, and Le troubadour des salons. The object is to ascertain the arrangement and interrelation of these three periodicals, thereby providing a detailed apparatus for scholars and catalogers when dealing with Meissonnier's publications. Antoine Meissonnier was one of many music publishers who established a business in Paris in the early years of the nineteenth century. He was also a guitarist and a minor composer, and his publications include both his own works and those by other composers, of which music for guitar has a central part. Meissonnier served as Fernando Sor's main publisher in Paris from about 1815 until 1827. Several of Sor's works were issued in connection with the Journal de lyre ou guitare.

Plate numbers can be of considerable help in determining the date of a printed edition of music. It is no secret, however, that the plate numbers of most French publishers of the early nineteenth century are of limited value because of their inconsistency or incomprehensible sequences. The publishers' addresses are generally more useful as dating tools since many French publishers changed addresses frequently: a new address could be the result of a physical change of domicile, but resulted as often from a post-revolutionary practice--partly ideologically-based--of extensive alterations or modifications of street names and house numberings. Antoine Meissonnier, for example, had six different addresses during the period 1811-25.

The two-volume Dictionnaire of French publishers by Anik Devriès and François Lesure provides copious information, including dated address lists, of all known French publishers from the earliest years of the trade until 1914. ¹ The address lists are based on various archival documents and on advertisements or announcements in the press. There are, however, several difficulties in creating such lists. Advertisements appeared irregularly, in particular for the minor publishers. Furthermore, announcements or advertisements could be printed belatedly and therefore reflect an address already abandoned. In Devriès's and Lesure's Dictionnaire, the correlation of address and date for some publishers has wide gaps. Antoine Meissonnier's address list is fairly complete, though not precise in all details, as we shall see later. ²

Each single item of an early-nineteenth-century music periodical usually had a caption title that included the name and address (imprint) of the publisher. Because of their regularity--monthly, in some cases weekly, issues--these periodicals are unique in reflecting the current address of the publisher at any given time, thereby providing a reliable source for a precise correlation of address and date. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the hitherto general disregard of this source material. The date of each periodical issue is not always easily ascertained, and few periodicals exist in near-complete runs in the same library or collection. Identifying single items and correlating them to...