Library

This dossier covers The Great Italian and French Composers, a significant bibliographic resource associated with George T. Ferris. The volume is useful because it helps place its subject within a wider historical, analytical or documentary context and complements the rest of the Library catalogue with a clearly identified…

Ferris’s volume assembles compact biographies of major German and Austro-German composers for the late nineteenth-century general reader. Its sequence helped popularize a canonical narrative running from Bach and Handel through Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to the Romantic generation and Wagner.

This collective biography shifts the emphasis from composers to performers, preserving nineteenth-century accounts of virtuosity, concert life, personality and repertory. For a performance-history collection it is valuable because it records the stories and reputations through which violinists and pianists were remembered before the age of sound recording.

The first series gathers biographical portraits of famous singers and gives a vivid sense of the celebrity culture surrounding nineteenth-century opera and concert performance. It preserves descriptions of voices, stage presence and public reception from an era with no surviving recordings of most of its subjects.

The second series extends Ferris’s gallery of singers and further documents the transnational operatic world in which reputations circulated between Italian, French, German, British and American stages.