Album Leaves for Piano – Manuscripts and Compositions in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the music album appears as a new type of manuscript. Unlike the traditional autograph- or friendship book ( Stammbuch ) where music only rarely appears, music becomes the manuscript’s only content, or at least to a substantial degree. In the course of the music album’s development, the originally favored contribution of the canon is replaced by piano pieces, which can be referred to as album leaves due to their materiality. The article gives an overview of selected music albums and how they came into being, the emergence of the title “album leaves,” the evolution of the genre, and the different approaches to composing album leaves by Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Fanny Hensel.