In 1808 a twenty-three-year-old Milanese violinist opens a shop in the Contrada di Santa Margherita. His name is Giovanni Ricordi, and the trade he knows is copying music. Six years later, in 1814, he is appointed copyist to the Teatro alla Scala. At that moment, without anyone noticing, the ownership of Italian music changes hands.
To see why, you have to know what a copyist really was, and it is not what the word suggests today. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the vast majority of music was not printed. Printing was expensive, required machines and print runs, and made sense only for what sold in large numbers, that is, parlour songs and piano dances. Everything else, operas included, circulated in manuscript copies. The composer delivered a score, and from it a man with a pen drew by hand all the parts for the orchestra and the singers.
This meant three things. The first is that without copyists an opera could not be staged, quite materially. The second is that the copyist was the bottleneck of production: the pace of a season depended on how fast the copying went, which is why workshops kept teams of men paid by the sheet, piecework, like typesetters. The third is the most important: whoever copied held in his house the only thing that mattered, the performing material. Whoever owned that, owned the opera. He could rent it out to other theatres, and he did.
Ricordi understood this before anyone else in Italy. In 1814 he does not buy an archive, he takes the right to manufacture one. From then on every title that passes through La Scala passes through his hands, and every time a provincial theatre wants that title it has to ask him. In 1825 he buys from La Scala the collection of autograph manuscripts. The house that emerges will publish Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, and for a century it will decide what is played in Italy.
In Vienna the mechanism was the same under different names. Wenzel Sukowaty was the official copyist of the Burgtheater, and the parts of Mozart’s operas performed in that theatre came out of his workshop. Johann Traeg, from 1799, issued a catalogue from which one could order by mail manuscript copies of thousands of compositions: a publishing house without printing, selling hand-made copies on demand.
The flip side is that the whole history of the music we read passed through the hands of these men, and their hands left traces. A careless copyist skips a bar, and that bar is missing for two centuries. A zealous copyist corrects a dissonance that looks wrong to him, and the correction enters the tradition. When only one source survives, the error becomes the text.
The limiting case is the most famous of all. The score of the Requiem delivered to Mozart’s widow and then to the patron who had commissioned it is not entirely in Mozart’s hand, and was long taken to be so precisely because it was the fair copy, the one for use. The distinction between who invented the music and who put it into a clean copy, which seems obvious to us, was written nowhere on the page in the eighteenth century.
There is also the chapter of copyists who were composers. In Leipzig, for the weekly cantatas, Bach had the parts copied by his wife Anna Magdalena and by his sons, and Anna Magdalena’s handwriting resembles his so closely that for decades some sources were wrongly attributed. The famous Notenbüchlein of 1725 is a household notebook in which the two hands alternate.
The trade ended with lithography and then industrial engraving, which from the middle of the nineteenth century made it worthwhile to print even large scores. Since then the word copyist has meant something else, namely someone who prepares parts from the originals of living composers, often in a hurry, often the night before the first rehearsal. The trade has not disappeared, it has simply become invisible: in Italy today it is almost always done by the composers themselves, for free, in front of a music notation program.
The house founded by the twenty-three-year-old copyist was bought by Bertelsmann in 1994. The historical archive is in Milan and holds, among other things, the autograph manuscripts of most of the Italian operas of the nineteenth century. They ended up there because in 1814 someone had understood that power lay not in writing the music but in keeping the papers.