Orchestral Conducting in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Roberto Illiano and Michela Niccolai (review)

As stated in the foreword, “the purpose of this volume is to study orchestral direction during the period of its greatest transformation,” which the editors consider “a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century” (p. xi). The volume contains eighteen out of twenty-six papers “presented at the international conference held in La Spezia, Italy, 14–16 July 2011, organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca) and the Società dei Concerti della Spezia in collaboration with Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de musique romantique française (Venice)” (pp. xiii– xiv).

A word on languages: the publisher and editors apparently believe that the educated reader would have a working knowledge of English, French, and Italian. While lengthy quotes in German have Italian translations in the footnotes, French quotes in English and Italian papers or Italian quotes in French papers do not. The footnotes refer freely to works in these languages, normally without translations. Further, the book would have been enhanced considerably if the editors had insisted that the authors provide abstracts of their articles, as required in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) and Journal of the Society for American Music (JSAM). This would have been particularly helpful for those articles in French, Italian, and Spanish, especially if the abstracts were in English, the language implied by the book’s title. (Translations throughout this review are my own.)

The papers are divided into five sections. The first four papers concern “Conductors and Conducting in Nineteenth-Century Europe.” Fiona M. Palmer, in “Conductors and Conducting in 19th-Century Britain: The Liverpool Philharmonic Society (1840–1895),” describes the work of five conductors, Jacob Zeugheer Herrmann, Alfred Mellon, Sir Julius Benedict, Max Bruch, and Charles Hallé, in developing the role of the conductor and raising that orchestra from a gentleman’s amateur ensemble to a fully professional one. Naomi Matsumoto, in “Michael Costa at the Haymarket: The Establishment of the Modern Role of ‘The Director of Music,’ ” recounts how Costa was able to take on many administrative and musical functions at the King’s Theater (later Her Majesty’s Theater), Haymarket, thereby “establishing the essential tasks of the modern ‘Director of Music,’ ” which “became indispensable to the musical and theatrical achievement of opera as a modern art form” (p. 49). Costa’s activities at the Haymarket (1830– 47) included assuming some of the work of the impresario, engaging composers and performers, and the selection of repertoire, in addition to conducting performances, duties traditionally split between the keyboard player and the first violinist. Four tables include the duties and personnel of the King’s Theater, a list of the concerts Costa conducted between 1830 and 1845 when he moved to Covent Garden, and surviving autograph letters to or from Costa from 1829 through 1884. Étienne Jardin, in “Les chefs d’orchestre dans les concerts parisiens de 1794 à 1815” (“Conductors in Parisian concerts 1794–1815”), found that in that brief period there were many terms for those in charge of instrumental concerts in newspaper announcements—chef, conducteur, directeur, “à la tête de l’orchestre”— and that the terms were basically synonymous, sometimes even carrying contradictory meanings. He includes a table of forty-five musicians designated as “dir.” in the papers, the most important being Jean-Jacques Grasset, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Pierre-Nicolas Le Houssaye, and Théodore Lefèvre. All were violinists, so presumably directed while playing (pp. 66–67). Jardin admits the limitations of his study: there is no identifiable leader for a quarter of the concerts held in Paris between 1794 and 1815, and the names in his table may be misleading, in that the conductors and soloists of the major opera houses are not represented. He suggests that the conductor at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a professor whose sole purpose was the progress of art (and not favoring a particular student), an event organizer attuned to the taste...