Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 1750-1930. (Book Reviews).

Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 1750--1930. By Bianca Maria Antolini. Pisa: Edizioni ETS Societa 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 dealt mostly in performance material 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 Marescalehi 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 emigres, 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 Marescalehi 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), ...