Music in the market place

MUSIC publishing arrived comparatively late in Vienna in comparison with much of Europe. A distinctive presence in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Venice and elsewhere since the end of the seventeenth century, it did not become an influential part of musical life in Vienna until the last couple of decades of the eighteenth century. It was not because music printing as a craft was unknown but because musical life itself did not require it. The musical activity of the imperial court was serviced by handwritten manuscripts (scores and parts) and since, for much of the century, the operatic repertoire was a private one, there was no tradition of issuing extracts in printed form, as in London, or printing complete operas, as in Bourbon France. In Vienna, the financial case for printing large-scale works, such as operas and church music, was not a viable one and, for all music, the general efficiency of manuscript copying, whether it was replacing a lost second oboe part for a Dittersdorf symphony or providing performance material for an entire opera by Paisiello, meant that there was little incentive to turn to printing. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century music dissemination was overwhelmingly through manuscript copies, and the steady supply of sonatas, quartets, concertos, symphonies, operas, masses and so on that was produced sustained an entire musical culture. Printed music was known, but it was often imported from elsewhere in Europe, such as Nuremberg and Paris, sold in bookshops in Vienna and only occasionally supplemented by material produced locally.

The decisive shift from dissemination by manuscript to dissemination in printed form occurred in the latter decades of the century. It was not a case of a new technology replacing an old one at the service of an unchanged musical environment, rather it coincided with fundamental changes in musical taste which, at first, it was able to promote and accelerate and, subsequently, also to mould. Patrons of music, at court or from the aristocracy, were influential in shaping musical taste; so, increasingly, were the commercial instincts of publishers.

The pioneering firm also proved to be one of the most enduring: Artaria, a name that figures prominently in Viennese musical life from the late eighteenth century to the First World War.