Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 1750-1930 (review)

Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 1750-1930. By Bianca Maria Antolini. Pisa: Edizioni ETS Società Italiana di Musicologica, 2000. [427 p. ISBN 88-467-035-88. L 65,000.]

This splendid directory of Italian music publishers needs to be in the reference collections of all major music research libraries. It succeeds the ground-breaking Dizionario by the late Claudio Sartori (Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani [Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1958]), if for only the second half of the history. Publishers before 1750 were different in kind. They were also in decline by the seventeenth century and effectively wiped out with the rise of the music copying industry. The later publishers described in this book come from a world not of producers of typographically printed partbooks and theory treatises, but of music shopkeepers who dealtmostlyinperformancematerial printed as engravings and, later, lithographs.

The story of this latter activity begins very late, the latest in fact of any of the major countries of western Europe. Only a few of the names listed here date from before Ricordi opened shop in 1808, and most of these were primarily retailers rather than producers of printed music. The best known and the most important are Marescalchi in Naples in the late 1780s and Alessandri e Scattaglia in Venice a bit later. The former is celebrated for his futile attempt to compete with the music copyists. The story of what really happened is elusive, but clearly he failed. The latter probably reflects on activity in Vienna, which was itself just beginning to flourish about this time with Italian emigrés, most notably Artaria. In an extensive 1989 Studi musicali essay (Bianca Maria Antolini, "Editori, copisti, commercio della musica in Italia: 1770-1800," Studi Musicali 18 [1989]: 273- 375), Antolini gave us a fuller account of the earliest activity in Italy. There are many references in this book to other writings on Marescalchi and Scattaglia, however, so as to suggest that the topics will continue to attract scholarly archival digging and imaginative conjecture for many years.

Many of the firms listed here issued one or only a few publications. Most of them were retailers, book sellers, or music shopkeepers who may never have aspired to a continuing activity in music publishing. What has made Italy so hard to survey is the fact that the country is so decentralized, in its musical life but most especially in its publishing institutions and copyright practices. Libraries, musicians, and collectors have also probably been more self-sufficient, if not often even inaccessible: personal contact has been essential. The longest entry is naturally for Ricordi (27 pages); Sonzogno comes in second (15 pages), Lucca third (11 pages). Beyond this, none of the nearly four hundred names described here run to more than six pages. Italian music publishing is also unlike its British or French counterparts, centralized in London and Paris, a fact confirmed by the fact that the entries in this directory come from no fewer than thirty cities. Of these, Milan claims 53 names, followed by Naples with 52, Florence with 49, Turin with 40, Rome with 37, Venice with 19, Bologna with 18, and Trieste with 15.

Antolini herself has contributed the entries for most of the major names and many of the minor ones as well. Other contributors, nearly fifty of them, reflect specialties that are most often geographic. All of the music publishers from Turin are described by Mario dell-Ara, for instance; most of those from Bologna are done by Michele Catarinella; from Trieste by Fabiana Licciadi; from Venice by Maria Loris Girardi; from Sicily by Consuela Giglio.

The emphasis in this directory is naturally on the founding events. This makes for the fastidious research that one admires, but it also leaves the terminal date of 1930 rather unsettled. The decade of the 1930s may now look like more of a minor hiatus than it probably really was. Certainly the post-war activity is a very different story, although its roots are...