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Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music, i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals. In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other disciplines address a rangeof unexplored topics, including the relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth century, the role of music in urban cultural development in the early twentieth, and the marketingof musical repertories, performers and instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse, multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products wereshaped by interrelationships between culture and commerce.
CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois.
ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also on the faculty.
CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S. Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright
Even when one writes a masterpiece, one runs the risk of being either unheard or pitied. The best thing to do is to wait and see, as a spectator, how this colossal comedy will end, a comedy in which entire nations act like puppets shaken by the strings of publicity.
Alfredo Catalani (1892)
PUCCINI'S La bohème, on a libretto adapted from Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896. The opera was preceded and accompanied by a publicity campaign, organized by the opera's publisher Ricordi, which was unprecedented in the history of Italian advertising. To my knowledge, the campaign was not only the first of its kind of such magnitude, but it is also the one for which materials are most accessible today. It also exemplifies Ricordi's marketing efforts in support of Puccini and provides evidence of the firm's experience with advertising campaigns and of its general perceptions of what would attract audiences. Ricordi utilized, in innovative ways, a great variety of new advertising tools: posters, postcards, reproductions of costumes and set designs in the periodical press, envelope seals (‘bolli chiudilettera’) and even a set of porcelain plates, as well as sheet music and scores. Turn-of-the-century Italy was a particularly good environment for developing new marketing techniques and for actively attempting to attract a larger and more diverse audience: Italian opera was going through a period of ideological and economic crisis, and the social, economic and political changes of the time were contributing to a widening of the existing opera audience. There were strong prospects for rejuvenating the image of Italian opera while targeting a previously underexploited revenue stream. Ricordi, the main Italian music publisher of the time, was in an especially privileged position for exploring such opportunities, since the firm owned publishing and performing rights to the music that it published and also served as an agent (in the modern sense) for the composers it had under contract. For these reasons, the publisher was invested both in promoting the genre of opera and in selling its own related products.