Music manuscripts and prints from the eighteenth century have increasingly been regarded by scholars of early-modern music historiography as integral components not only of musical performances, but also of music-based sociability and various forms of exchange and reception. Two historical figures who relate to all of these issues are the London publishers John Walsh (1665/1666–1736) and his son of the same name (1709–1766), who printed and distributed dances, instrumental pieces, selected arias and entire aria corpuses from operas and oratorios between 1694 and 1766.
Research on their prints has so far taken place largely in Britain, and has focused for the most part on George Frideric Handel and on printing techniques. The conference ‘Walsh in Europe and Beyond’, held at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald and at the Universität Greifswald, extended this field through a systematic investigation of European and international sheet-music collections, their provenance and the traces of their use. Its aim was to uncover Europe-wide and global distribution channels, user groups and the aesthetic or political functions of eighteenth-century music. The papers presented over the two and a half days were mainly grouped into regional areas.
In our introduction, we (Gesa zur Nieden (Universität Greifswald) and Berthold Over (Universität Greifswald)) pointed to several points of departure when investigating the distribution and function of Walsh's prints in Europe. The presence of these publications in the British Isles and Continental Europe offers many hints: frequent maritime trade facilitated the shipping of these prints, while individuals and diplomatic networks functioned as intermediaries and conduits for transmission. The uses of the Walsh prints are difficult to define with certainty; they seem to flow between categories of material for domestic music-making and objects for remembering performances, promoting celebrity and sharing in contemporaneous discourses about opera.
In his keynote address ‘Cultural Transfer in Music in the Age of Enlightenment: Methodology and Research Questions’ Martin Eybl (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), starting with Gottfried van Swieten's order for English prints, painted a cultural-historical picture that linked dissemination to the concepts of influence, cultural transfer, reception and mobility/migration, as well as discourses on translation studies and histoire croisée. He identified several aspects and agents related to the distribution of music: the buying public, cultural localization, mediators of musical material (arrangers, compilers) and limitations (such as regions not using Roman typeface, as in the case of Russia).
In his paper ‘The Music Editions of John Walsh Junior and His Successors: Working Practices, Publishing Strategies and Reception’, Donald Burrows (The Open University, Milton Keynes) offered a comprehensive insight into Walsh's operating principles and policies. The younger Walsh – who, besides being a music publisher, had a double role as music seller and instrument maker – strived in particular to have a wide-ranging catalogue including operas, songs, instrumental pieces, church music and occasional works for festival-style performances. From 1739 he owned the privilege for selling Handel's music. Walsh's prime market was the London public, which was continuously being targeted by advertisements – except during the summer months, when potential buyers left the capital for their home towns or country estates. However, he appears to have made little effort to promote trade abroad, even if some advertisements from Holland make mention of his prints. Instead, individuals, including members of the Lobkowicz family and Gottfried van Swieten, were apparently responsible for the dissemination of Walsh's prints beyond Britain.
Berta Joncus (Goldsmiths, University of London), in ‘“No Country shall outdo us in either Perfection or Price”: John Walsh and Estienne Roger’, focused on similarities and differences between the publishers Walsh (senior) and Étienne Roger (Amsterdam). Whereas Walsh did not care about trade with the Continent, Roger sold and advertised his publications in London as well as in his home city. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, both printers sold editions of Corelli's sonatas and works by Francesco Gasparini. From 1718, when Walsh senior started to sell Roger prints, he pirated the latter's editions of Handel's harpsichord sonatas. Such ‘aggressive tactics’ were later carried on by the former Walsh apprentice engraver Matthias Hall, who reprinted Walsh's existing editions in order to counter pirated versions. This competition might also have influenced the quality of the prints: while Roger, whose work was always more expensive than that of Walsh, mimicked the beautiful Roman Corelli editions, Walsh tried to create his own luxury edition.
In ‘Where Did John Walsh's Editions of Works by Francesco Geminiani Go?’, Rudolf Rasch (Universiteit Utrecht) explored the surviving Walsh prints of Geminiani's music, establishing a timeline and set of categories for their acquisition by collectors. His ‘history of ownership’ distinguishes between first owners, second owners (the next generation), the era of collectors (nineteenth century) and the era of libraries (twentieth and twenty-first centuries), thus pointing to the different functions of the prints, which range from personal use to public storage. First owners like Charles Wesley or William Felton were nearly exclusively British, and so too are the most important library collections of Walsh's Geminiani prints.
Estelle Murphy (Maynooth University) dealt with the dissemination of Walsh prints in Ireland. Despite the country's connections to England, there are only a few traces of trade and collecting there in the eighteenth century. For example, Lady Mary Bruce, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1740–1796), owned a copy of the very popular comic opera Love in a Village (with music by Thomas Arne), and Trinity College Dublin holds scores of Handel's operas, among them Flavius and Sosarme (both containing handwritten extracts copied from Charles Burney's published thoughts on that work). More is known about Walsh prints in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by items held in the Sperrin-Johnson Collection (University College Cork). Nevertheless, the firm's prints were already being republished in Ireland in pirated editions in the eighteenth century.
Leaving the British sphere and turning to the Holy Roman Empire, Emilia Pelliccia (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) and Konstantin Hirschmann (Universität Wien) presented research on the holdings of an important collector in Vienna, Anthony van Hoboken. Hoboken assembled a huge number of Walsh prints from a variety of sources. These included previous collectors, aristocrats, clerics, musicians and various private individuals. For Hoboken, the sheer quantity of his collection seems to have been more important than the variety of musical repertoire that it contained. Owners’ marks are more frequently found in the genres of opera and oratorio than in instrumental music.
Berthold Over began his paper ‘Walsh Prints in Munich: The Collection of Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut’ by noting a discovery: a copy of Walsh's Compleat Country Dancing Master (c1730), which must have entered the Bavarian court collections before 1742, when Karl Albrecht was elected Holy Roman Emperor, since it bears the coats of arms that he and his wife previously used, and not the imperial crown. He then turned to an early nineteenth-century collection that, for once, was not assembled with the aim of performing ancient music. Trying to understand how Thibaut could have come into possession of these prints meant considering the role of performance documentation (in this case a list of the pieces performed in rehearsals and concerts, with dates, which helps to define the terminus ante quem for the purchase of prints), trade relations, booksellers, networks and correspondence.
Andreas Waczkat (Universität Göttingen) gave a paper, ‘A Most Plenty of Books: Walsh Prints in Gottfried Jacob Jänisch's Hamburg Private Library’, concerning a Hamburg collection of the eighteenth century which was auctioned between 1782 and 1787. Jänisch was in possession of sixteen Walsh prints, and the existence of a Walsh catalogue (which, according to Donald Burrows in the discussion that followed the paper, may differ from the catalogues hitherto known) documents the possibility that such items could be ordered from abroad. Waczkat further raised the question of how Walsh's scores might have shaped understandings of Handel among early musicologists such as Johann Nikolaus Forkel or Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut. Hamburg was also the focal point of Martin Loeser (Universität Greifswald), who, in his paper ‘Chrysander and Beyond: Provenance and Use of Walsh Prints in Hamburg’, looked into the vast collection of Friedrich Chrysander, the pioneer of Handel research. Several clues, such as added indexes, traces of use due to flipping of pages, underlaid translations, annotations, and added dynamics and markings show that the prints were really used. Gesa zur Nieden then emphasized the role of James Harris, who, as a diplomat, acted as a broker for Maria Amalia of Prussia, in ‘The Reception of Walsh Prints and Favourite Airs in the Dynasty of the Prussian Royal Family and Its Networks’. Maria Amalia had many Walsh prints in her music collection, though no items from the series The Favourite Songs (1721–1766), because Harris only gave her complete works rather than miscellaneous collections. All in all, the collecting of musical items from foreign countries must be seen as a kind of evidence of a cosmopolitan mind-set.
A roundtable – accompanied by a performance of Walsh repertoire by Klaus Holsten (flute), Gertrud Ohse (cello) and Frank Dittmer (harpsichord) in the baroque auditorium (dating from 1750) of the Universität Greifswald – opened up a broader discussion on the evaluation of music printing between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Andrea Horz (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), Maximilian Rosenthal (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig) and Maren Bagge (Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover) presented their research projects on ‘Opera-Related Music Prints in the German-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century’, ‘Taste Formation and Publishing Policies: Repertoire Development and Canonisation as Reflected in the Sales Development of Leipzig Music Publishers (c1830–1930)’ and ‘Favourite Songs: Popular English Music Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’. The panel discussed the price levels and affordability of the prints, their social functions (for example, in salons), the popularity and fashions connected to sheet music and the correlation between musical events and music publications.
The conference turned to research into the colonial legacies of the Walshes’ output with a paper by Samantha Owens (Victoria University of Wellington), ‘Apollo's Feast and “a Pewter Mug”: John Walsh Prints in New Zealand and Australia’. The number of prints preserved in these former colonies, brought there by migrants from the British Isles, is significant. Furthermore, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music collectors such as Robert Dalley-Scarlett and Sarah Harriet Selwyn played an important role in the dissemination of Walsh prints in these countries. The prints testify to the popularity of Handel's music in the colonies and were a means to strengthen migrants’ cultural identities and sustain ties to Europe, especially via choral music.
Other recent findings reveal that Walsh prints came to France in the eighteenth century, as Laurent Guillo (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) demonstrated. Not only are French names identifiable in subscription lists, but Walsh prints are also found in sales catalogues, mentioned in privilèges, bear owners’ marks or are present in auction catalogues. Around 1749 the flautist Jean Vincent was given the privilège to sell the works of Handel and other English compositions in France. Guillo demonstrated how most of the Walsh prints in France are editions that were formerly published by Roger. Although the biggest holdings are today found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, thirty-seven Walsh titles can also be found outside Paris.
The most interesting holdings of Walsh prints in Italy derive from Padre Martini, whose collection is held in the Museo della musica in Bologna. Giulia Giovani (Università di Siena) discussed two further Walsh catalogues formerly in the possession of the famous Padre. The paper highlighted how other important collections in Bergamo, Rome, Venice, Naples and Forlì were formed in the nineteenth century, although English prints were offered for sale in Leghorn (Livorno) in the late 1700s. The first Italian catalogue with music produced by Walsh was published there in 1789.
Spain and Portugal were the focus of a paper by Maria João Albuquerque (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and Miguel Ángel Marín (Universidad de La Rioja). Some prints seem to have arrived there by the early eighteenth century, the courts and aristocrats playing a dominant role in this process. There are some striking examples of the uses of the prints in this period; for example, Walsh prints from a monastic library were arranged for performance within the liturgy. The presenters went on to examine how Walsh copies in Spain and Portugal include music by Thomas Arne, who played in London's Portuguese Church.
In Sweden, significant holdings of prints are preserved, as Emma Sohlgren (Uppsala universitet) and Lars Berglund (Uppsala universitet) demonstrated in their presentation ‘John Walsh Publications in Swedish Libraries: Provenance, Possible Uses and Examples of Manuscript Dissemination’. In the eighteenth century, prints were taken back to Sweden by those who had lived in London for a period of time. Carl Diederic Engelhart, for example, studied in London around 1750 and returned to his home country with several Walsh prints. Among the Walsh items stored in Uppsala are those from the library of Francis Diedrich Wackerbarth, who moved from England to Sweden around 1851, and the London organist Charles Wesley Junior. Aneta Markuszewska (Uniwersytet Warszawski) looked into Polish collections (‘Walsh's Roads to Poland: English Publications in Polish Collections’), in which many items seem to have come from Germany during and after the Second World War. Now they are preserved in Warsaw (coming originally from the Musikalisches Institut bei der Universität Breslau), Lodz (from Philipp Spitta's collection) and Kraków (items from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). Among these important collections, that of Kraków contains many Walsh prints from around 1700.
As a result of this inspiring and extremely rich conference, we can take away the key point that Walsh's prints were not systematically imported to the Continent and the colonies. Rather, they were taken to new destinations by individuals who bought them during their London sojourns. Nevertheless, a kind of trade seems to have taken place too, if we consider the example of Hamburg or the catalogues preserved elsewhere, which point to a custom of ordering items directly from the Walsh firm or through booksellers. A significant result of the conference was the recognition of the importance of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors in carrying out early music-historiographical work on London-based composers and their music in the eighteenth century. Since the factors relating to the formation of these various collections are so diverse (including diplomatic relations, aristocratic representation and the general desire to save ancient music), the conference provided an inspiring basis for further work on the dissemination and uses of music prints in Europe during the early Enlightenment era.
