The production archive from B. Schott’s Söhne, Mainz is now located in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. It contains about 80,000 sources, consisting of about 60,000 items of printed music and 20,000 music manuscripts.
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Erik Pierre Hofmann has a wonderful article on the “Guitar à la Sagrini” available for free from his website:
https://www.fine-antique-and-classical-guitars.com/editions-des-robins-en/
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An updated English version of my article on Luigi Legnani’s missing opus 9 has been published by Soundboard Scholar. The original version was first published in Italian in il Fronimo n. 194 in April 2021 and in Japanese in Gendai Guitar n. 696 September 2021. A full facsimile of the original Legnani opus 9 edition is included with the article.
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Otto Feder (1820-??), a native of Germany, was a guitarist active in the United States from the mid-1850s to 1869.
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The complete known published and unpublished compositions of Justin Holland (1819-1887) and his son Justin Minor Holland (1848-1917) are listed here.
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I will present here two different sets of publications of music by Fernando Sor published in the United States in the 19th century. While there may be other editions published in the US in the 19th century, I will focus on these two sets because it appears there is little to no information written about them before now.
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I recently came into possession of a number of programs and articles from 1926 and one article from 1927 regarding Segovia’s concerts in Russia. In Matanya Ophee’s 2017 article “Segovia and the Russians” he included some of these items. I’m sure the book by Vaisbord includes the details from the programs and articles but I don’t have a copy of the book to compare. Hopefully this information will be of interest to others so I make them available here.
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Wednesday, May 19 through Sunday, May 23. Held this year as a virtual event. All concerts and lectures can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/Timofeyev63.
An exciting new book from Erik Pierre Hofmann and Stefan Hackl currently in pre-order status. Visit the Les Éditions des Robins website of Erik Hofmann for more details.
On the question of the actual name of Mertz, around the turn of the 20th century guitar writers made assumptions about the initials “J. K.” While in the 1980’s Astrid Stempnik discovered the birth name of Mertz to be “Caspar Joseph,” the earlier writers used either “Joseph Kaspar” or “Johann Kaspar.” Somehow “Johann” became the definitive reading of his initial “J.” and has been repeated over the past 100 years. Repetition does not always make information correct. Mertz never used his full first or second name in promoting himself either in concerts or publications. In fact, even after he died his widow posted advertisements to sell his instruments by using his performing name “J. K. Mertz.”
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