Ad Parnassum - A Journal of Eighteen and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music

Abstract

The transformation of musical practices in Lisbon at the end of the Ancien Regime: new commercial dynamics, cosmopolitan models and keyboard repertoires.

During the Reign of Queen Maria I (1777-1816) new musical practices have developed in Portugal and the business of music became a flourishing one. Musicians who had established themselves in Lisbon in the previous decades, hired by the Royal Chamber and other important musical institutions of the Crown, were then bestowed royal privileges for trading. Their warehouses imported music, instruments and other sophisticated products such as nautical instruments and luxury accessories. Newspapers began advertising for these traders on musical matters promoting novelty and cosmopolitanism. Advertisements recommended the music or the instruments of the “best piano Professors in Europe”, making some special note of the Luso-Brazilian market. The article addresses music as part of the new commercial dynamics that developed in Lisbon at the end of the Ancien Regime, promoting keyboard repertoires that respond to (a) the interest in a new sentimental opera for domestic consumption in keyboard arrangements (La Molinara and Nina from Paisiello are the most interesting cases); (b) the composition of Variations longing commercial viability based on local hits such as the case of theatrical dance (lundum from Monroi) and popular urban songs (Moda do Tiro liro) or cosmopolitan ones, like Marlborough. In fact these are already the principles that Carl Czerny will confirm as good thematic options for keyboard variations in School of Practical Compositional (c. 1848) and in his own piano works.