Les Freres Wieniawski: Documents conserves dans les collections de la Bibliotheque Royal de Belgique (review)

This modest-sized volume is a catalogue of the collection of documents in the Royal Belgian Library that serves as homage to the Wieniawski brothers, Henryk (1835-80) and Józef (1837-1912). As Renata Suchowiejko explains in her brief, yet informative introduction, these two Polish musicians played a significant role in the musical life of Brussels during the second half of the nineteenth century. Henryk, a student of the Belgian violinist Lambert Massart at the Paris Conservatoire, became a faithful exponent of the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing. He was a frequent visitor to the Belgian capital during his career as an itinerant violin virtuoso, and he succeeded Vieuxtemps as violin professor at the Brussels Conservatoire. Józef, a pianist and composer, undertook concert tours with Henryk in Russia and Germany in the early 1850s but soon followed an independent artistic path, eventually starting a long association with Brussels as a piano teacher, a prominent chamber musician and accompanist, and a prolific composer in a variety of musical genres.

The catalogue comprises relevant details of the collection's music manuscripts, letters, musical autographs, published scores, monographs, and recordings, and it includes facsimile reproductions of fifteen of the exhibits. The music manuscripts total just two—an annotated copy of Henryk's Second Violin Concerto, Op. 22 and an annotated score and parts of Józef's Rêverie, Op. 45 for orchestra—but the printed musical material includes twenty-two publications of Henryk's music, presented in order of opus number, as well as four works without opus number and one volume combining the Polonaises Opp. 4 and 21. Two works for violin and piano (an Allegro de sonate, Op. 2 and a Grand duo polonais, Op. 8) published jointly by Henryk and Józef in the early 1850s form another subsection, while five of Józef's published works with opus numbers constitute a further division.

The various letters in the collection offer some of its most interesting insights, particularly in respect of Józef's career, since sources concerning him are the richer and more prevalent here. The catalogue gives a fairly full description of each exhibit, notably in terms of ink, paper, measurements, condition, date, and other relevant detail, but no indication as to content or, in some cases, the significance of either a particular letter or even of the other correspondent. Thus, one is frustratingly left in the dark regarding the importance or otherwise of Henryk's letter of 11 October 1876 to François-Auguste Gevaert, director of the Brussels Conservatoire, or Józef's fairly extensive correspondence with Mme and Mlle Marie Van der Heyden over nearly a decade. However, Henri Vieuxtemps's letter to Henryk of 15 August 1875 is available in full as one of the facsimile reproductions at the end of the volume, as also is one letter from Józef to Mme Van der Heyden and correspondence to Józef from Grieg, Cui, and Saint-Saëns. Letters to Józef from, among others, Jules Delsart, Jules de Swert, Niels Gade, Joseph Hellmesberger, Theodor Leschetizky, Charles Malherbe, Arthur Nikisch, Anton Rubinstein, and Tchaikovsky also feature in the collection, along with one from the Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko, whose works Józef strove vigorously to make known in the West.

Among other documents relevant to Józef Wieniawski are autograph musical dedications to him by musicians such as Daniel Auber, Heinrich Ernst, Henri Litolff, Meyerbeeer, Ignaz Moscheles, Rossini, and Jules Schulhoff and some musical autographs without dedication, notably a little-known signed extract from Berlioz, dated 2 September 1858, of nine bars of the oboe part of his King Lear overture. Details of the collection's monographs about the brothers and its holdings of recordings of their works, along with reproductions of some of its handsomely engraved portraits...