The Operatic Guitar: A Study of Selected Pieces From Opern-Revue, Op. 8 by Josef Kaspar Mertz

Abstract

Josef Kaspar Mertz was one of the premier guitarists and composers of the mid-nineteenth century. Although his music fell out of favor after his death, there has been a renewed interest in his compositions in recent decades. However, extant scholarship has been primarily restricted to a handful of pieces from his prolific output. This dissertation will broaden the conversation on Mertz and his contributions to Romantic music by using his Opern-Revue, Op. 8, a collection of thirty-three pieces based on operatic themes, to examine the nineteenth-century musical landscape. In the Biedermeier era (1815-1848), the guitar experienced a surge of popularity with the rise of the middle class; however, by the time Mertz arrived in Vienna in 1841, the guitar was on the decline as it began to be replaced by the piano. The guitar and the piano had played similar roles in early nineteenth-century musical life as solo or ensemble instruments used in both private and public spheres, and there likely was some stylistic exchange among the music composed for the two instruments. As the century progressed, the piano supplanted the guitar in both realms, and the guitar’s place in the musical landscape of the nineteenth century has since been largely neglected. As a result, the majority of scholarship on operatic paraphrases has been confined to the keyboard repertoire, despite being a significant portion of the output of many instrumental composers, and Mertz’s opera fantasies have mostly been excluded from scholarly conversations, not only in discussions of noteworthy mid-nineteenth century guitar compositions but also as a major facet of the genre of operatic paraphrase. Five pieces from the Opern-Revue will be used in this study to examine specific elements of nineteenth-century music: virtuosity, narrative issues in operatic transcriptions and arrangements, the reception of opera in Vienna, the changes in musical tastes that contributed to the guitar’s decline, and what that decline has meant for the guitar in musicological discussions. Although many of these elements have been discussed previously in relation to piano music, the two instruments did not exist in separate realms, and the study of how these elements are manifested in Mertz’s paraphrases for the guitar is worth careful examination. This dissertation will explore the playing techniques Mertz developed in these compositions through detailed analysis of the works and comparisons with fantasies by contemporaries like Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, and Mauro Giuliani. Liszt and Thalberg pushed the opera fantasy to new heights of technical and “dramatic integrity,” according to Charles Suttoni; this dissertation will illustrate that what Liszt and Thalberg did on the piano, Mertz did for opera fantasies on the guitar. Most significantly, exploring these compositions can offer a new lens through which to view the cultural and musical developments of the mid-nineteenth century.