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The Prager musikalisches Album (1838) and the nineteenth-century salon as cultural practice
Bunzel, Anja
This article deals with a collection of songs and piano pieces, the Prager musikalisches Album, published in 1838, asking two central questions. Drawing on different concepts of the musical work (Werkbegriff), I explore whether the album can be considered a work rather than a loose collection of multiple works. Within the musicological discourse there have been many attempts at defining these terms, ranging from quite narrow categorisations based on aspects of instrumentation, musical form, or stylistic matters to more open approaches encompassing the communicative process and viewing the history of genre as cultural history. Drawing on the latter, I suggest that the Prager musikalisches Album is a prime example of collective authorship, which opens up a second question, namely that of authorship. Authorship may embrace aspects of agency that exceed the realms of the person who penned a musical, literary, or artistic work. Indeed, it may be shaped by performers, audiences, presses/ salespeople, dedicatees, critics, patrons, and anyone else who has an impact on any given work at the time of its creation and/or publicization. By taking this perspective, I suggest that the Prager musikalisches Album is both reflective and representative of nineteenth-century salon culture, within whose context the album was embedded. Offering a holistic analysis of the album and its context, I use this article as a springboard to advocate for a musical historiography that takes into account the full breadth of musical culture, and which embraces, besides composers and poets, a number of other cultural agents that are often overlooked within more traditional music-historical considerations.
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