Revising the History of the Miniature Score

Abstract

Ever since Cecil Hopkinson wrote in 1972 that the first miniature scores were published in 1802 by Ignace Pleyel, his seemingly minor point has been accepted by historians of music publishing as a given.1 Surprisingly, no one before Hopkinson had paid much attention to the origin of small scores, in spite of their implications for the social history of music. If, as we assume, miniature or study scores were not intended for performance but rather for study, they indicate the presence of a new class of music-lovers: educated, i.e., musically literate people who took the trouble to provide themselves with these smaller scores, presumably for reading, performing at the keyboard, and at concerts. In his Soirees de l'orchestre, Hector Berlioz mentions some of these people with, I think, unjust sarcasm. At a concert in London of the Beethoven Quartet Society, he observed members of the audience following with small scores [partitions-diamant] printed in London for this purpose, the fanciful flight of thought of the master. Quite a few seemed able to read the scores, Berlioz wrote, although he was cautious in making this judgment. He had looked over the shoulder of one reader to discover that his eyes were still fixed on page four while the performers were playing page six.2 Berlioz was having his fun here, though he actually saw only one member of the score-following audience apparently lost; moreover, he had admitted just a few lines earlier that this same audience expressed the greatest enthusiasm for the late quartets of Beethoven which-as Berlioz put it in about 1850-were supposedly incomprehensible. We therefore have some justification for assuming that this was a highly sophisticated audience, many of whom were the music with scores. According to Hopkinson, Pleyel's first publication in miniature-score format consisted of four symphonies by Haydn under the title Bibliotheque musicale. By 1828 Pleyel had published several more sets of Haydn symphonies, thirty Haydn quartets, six quartets and five quintets by Mozart, and one septet each by Beethoven and Hummel. Three