Documenting the musical world

ONE of the annual rituals for many musicians and lovers of music in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was the publication in December of the latest version of Fromme's Musikalische Welt. Carl Fromme was a printer, publisher and bookseller with an imperial and royal warrant, ‘K. u. k. Hof-Buchdruckerei und Hof-Verlags-Buchhandlung’, based in the Trattnerhof on the Graben, who had developed a lucrative business in creating diaries for particular professions and occupations such as the clergy, doctors, lawyers, farmers and the fire service. The one for the ‘musical world’ had first appeared in readiness for 1876 and maintained its schedule of annual publication through to 1901 under the same editor, the music critic and writer Theodor Helm. Bruckner, a personal friend, is one musician who is known to have used it. Typically consisting of up to 400 closely printed pages and measuring 12 × 7 centimetres, it was designed for the pocket, with a sheath on the side to hold a short pencil. Commonly referred to as the ‘blue book’, it was a mine of information, an exhaustive documentation of the musical environment in Vienna and of the wider society that supported the art.

In common with Fromme's other diaries, it lists all statutory holidays, important days in the Protestant, Greek, Jewish as well as Catholic religious calendar, exchange rates, postage rates and the alternative names for the months of the year: Eismonat for January, Weinmonat for October and so on. For the imperial family, dates of birth are given for the extended family, over two dozen living individuals. There are two lengthy lists of living composers, one for the Vaterland and one for abroad; for Vienna itself an alphabetical list of musicians of all kinds is given plus their addresses, useful at a time when the postal service would deliver on the same day in the inner city and foot messengers lingered on street corners waiting to deliver material even more quickly by hand. There were other musical lists: composers who had recently died, books on music published in the past year, opera premieres abroad, music journals in the German language, music critics in Vienna, and newspapers that regularly included musical criticism.