ON THE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION ABOUT MUSIC IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SESSION

Abstract

Some ten years ago I wrote, in a brochure describing the series Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century France,1 that ?musical activities in Paris during the first half of the century were a subject about which music lovers from San Francisco to St. Petersburg read with great interest, in the then flourishing musical press?. As a major musical capital of Europe it was understandable that Parisian musical activities would, to some extent, be a subject of international attention and therefore reported on throughout Europe and the Americas. And, indeed, it was. At the same time, the nineteenth-century press, to quote the editors of The Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900, reflected ?the national history at its most self conscious.?2 And, while we are beginning, in part through RIPM publications,3 to understand the extent