Manuscript Cultures
Musicians wanted!The Album of Marie Pohlenz
16 September 2021
Photo: Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig
Many 19th-century musicians maintained a ‘musical friendship album’ in which friends or well-known musicians wrote down small composition sketches. The album of singer and pianist Marie Pohlenz brings together prominent figures of the Leipzig music scene of the time. After more than 150 years, the pieces in it are accessible again. To read, listen, and play.
First recordings available!
Using the example of Marie Pohlenz's album, the CSMC invites you to explore the private music-making practice of the 19th century. If you would like to play the pieces yourself, both transcriptions of the pieces and a digital copy of the entire manuscript are available for download. We would be pleased to receive your interpretations as audio or video recordings, which you can send via the contact form. If you agree, we will also publish the recordings on our website and link them to the corresponding pages of the digitised manuscript.
Listen to the recordings by Alexander Schöppl, Ewelina Nowicka, and Elisaveta Ilina.
There has been increasing talk of a ‘retreat into the private sphere’ since the pandemic-related restrictions, which went hand in hand with a far-reaching shutdown of public life. The music sector – like the whole cultural sector – has been hit hard by the measures to contain the pandemic: due to closed concert halls and opera houses as well as cancelled festivals, public performances were hardly possible. As a consequence, musicians were limited to the domestic sphere and were restricted to making music in private or (very) small ensembles. Already in March 2020, some began to play concerts at home and to stream them for the public. By now, this new type of performance, often called ‘living room concert’ or ‘house concert’, can be considered an established format. Not only have individual performers such as Igor Levit and Daniel Hope regularly brought music from their own living rooms into the living rooms of listeners, but also have institutions such as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra or radioeins created a podium for small ensembles and bands with their living room concert series. The Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival even has organised musical ‘home visits’.
A large part of musical life taking place in the private sphere is not a new phenomenon, however. For the nineteenth century it can be assumed that the musical horizon of the bourgeoisie was decisively shaped by this musical practice in private, despite the numerous public concerts and opera performances that took place as well. Professional musicians, composers and amateurs met in town houses to make music together. The range of private music-making practices is wide, including, for example, performances of entire operas by enthusiasts as well as evenings of four-hands piano playing. At the same time, private circles of connoisseurs offered composers and performers a protected space in which more sophisticated compositions could be tested and discussed.
Private music-making in the 19th century
Music albums are linked closely to the practice of private music-making. These are manuscripts that were created by their owners to collect musical entries from relatives and friends, teachers, role models and other acquaintances. A close personal relationship to the inscribers was not a prerequisite. Music-related conviviality and Kränzchen offered the best opportunities to make contacts and collect entries. At the same time, it can be assumed that looking through the host’s or hostess’s album together was a popular activity at gatherings in bourgeois houses and, furthermore, there is evidence of making music together from albums. Entries in such albums – as personal as they may seem in individual cases – are therefore not to be seen as a purely private matter between the person making the entry and the owner of the album. The function of the album as a medium bridging the private and public spheres becomes even more apparent where album keepers transfer entries dedicated to them to other albums, or where album entries are printed afterwards.
Presented here is an album that is kept in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig and could be digitised at the CSMC as part of the project ‘Creating Music Albums as Originals Made of Originals’. The relatively large-format but thin book – it measures 25.5x34.5 cm (landscape) and contains only 15 leaves – belonged to Marie Pohlenz from Leipzig, daughter of the Gewandhauskapellmeister Christian August Pohlenz. Little is known about the album owner: in 1848 she was accepted as a student at the Leipzig conservatory, and in September 1850 and May 1851 there is evidence of her taking part in the conservatory’s public examinations in choral singing and piano playing. In later years she is said to have worked as a teacher in Leipzig.
The contents of the album point to the environment of the Leipzig conservatory, too: A total of seventeen entries were noted in the album, which are listed in the table below. The earliest dated entry is by the composer Niels W. Gade and was written in summer 1850, when Gade was in Leipzig to attend the premiere of Robert Schumann’s Genoveva; the last dated entry was written by the Berlin conductor and composer Wilhelm Taubert in autumn 1853. Almost all entries were made in Leipzig. Many of the teachers of the conservatory active at the time of Pohlenz’s studies – all important personalities also of Leipzig’s public musical life and for the most part known far beyond Leipzig – have inscribed themselves in the album. These are: Ignaz Moscheles, pianist, composer and conductor, who was head of the piano class at the conservatory; Moritz Hauptmann, a music theorist and composer, was Thomaskantor and teacher of music theory and composition; the cellist and composer Julius Rietz was Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Stadttheater, conductor of the Singakademie and musical director of the Gewandhaus concerts, he also taught composition at the conservatory; the music theorist and composer Ernst Friedrich Richter was organist at St Peter’s Church and a regular teacher of harmony and counterpoint from as early as 1843; the music teacher Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel taught piano; the violinist and composer Ferdinand David was concertmaster at the Gewandhaus Orchestra and taught violin at the conservatory; Raimund Dreyschock and the still very young Joseph Joachim were his direct colleagues at both institutions.
Andreas Grabau is another Gewandhaus musician who added an entry, and there is one by the singer and actor Heinrich Behr. Ludvig Norman and Robert Radecke, on the other hand, were fellow students of Pohlenz at the conservatory. The reason why Marie Polenz only asked these two for an entry is not clear. Entries from the album owner’s family environment are limited to those of her two brothers Emil and Paul. Only the entries of Taubert and the music teacher and composer Gustav Wilhelm Teschner cannot be traced back to the album owner’s Leipzig environment: Taubert was Kapellmeister at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Teschner worked in Berlin as a singing teacher.
The album of Marie Pohlenz
It seems that a large number of entries was written on the assumption that Pohlenz was able to play them. This is indicated on the one hand by the relatively large number of complete compositions or at least self-contained excerpts from compositions. On the other hand, it is striking that mainly compositions for piano and songs were entered, which corresponds to Pohlenz’s abilities as shown by the programmes of the conservatory’s examinations she took: in 1850, she performed as a soloist in the choral singing examination and in 1851, she was one of the performers of Moscheles’s Hommage à Händel for two pianos. Only for the entry of the fellow student Radecke, who notated the first part of one of his (at the time of the entry still unpublished) pieces for pianoforte and violin, Pohlenz needed a partner musician, even though the songs with piano accompaniment are also better performed by two people. The arrangement for piano, which David made from his own composition for the album, could also have originated from the desire to make the composition playable for the album owner. He notated the ‘Kinderlied’ from the Bunte Reihe for violin and piano for Pohlenz, and a whole series of corrections reveal that the reworking was probably done spontaneously. It is noteworthy that at the time of the entry, Franz Liszt’s piano arrangement of the piece had already been published, but David does not refer to it for the entry. Among the thirteen musical entries, nine are complete compositions or at least comprise self-contained musical parts, so they can be sensibly played from the album. Should the album holder have played them privately, then presumably not exclusively for herself, but also at musical gatherings, thus creating a, albeit locally limited, publicity. However, some of the compositions are also available in print or can be traced in other albums of the time, which means that they found an audience beyond the circle of the album owner. Except for a song by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (op. 47,4 ‘Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath’) entered by Heinrich Behr, all of the inscribed compositions are essentially forgotten today.
By publishing the images of the album, the CSMC invites you to get a sense of the private music-making practice of the 19th century, to explore the album, and to discover the pieces by playing them. For this purpose and in addition to the digital version of the manuscript, we provide transcriptions of the entries containing complete compositions for download. We would be delighted to receive your audio or video recording of your interpretations via the contact form. If you agree, we will publish the recordings on the website, linked to the corresponding pages of the digital copy of the album.