Musical Dedications, in Love and Friendship
Monday, February 14, 2022
Dédié à Madame Son Epouse —Jean-Baptiste Krumpholtz
Al mio amico F. Brizzi —Fabio Campana
Composed, and most humbly Dedicated (by Permission) His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge —Catherine Hyde Solari
Meinem lieben “Basler Liederkranz” gewidmet —Edwin Schlumpf
Valentine’s Day is a time to think about those who you hold dear. And what better way to show your love and affection than to dedicate a piece of music to them? Spouses, friends, kings and queens, patrons, religious leaders, and even institutions have all been the recipients of musical dedications throughout the history of printed music, starting from the earliest days with the Harmonice musices Odhecaton of 1501, dedicated to Girolamo Donati (RISM ID no. 993103756).
Though RISM has been documenting historical printed music since the 1950s, details of dedications and dedicatees were frequently omitted from our early print publications due to lack of space. This means that even today in the online catalog, dedicatees oftentimes go unmentioned in these records. Thankfully, our RISM contributors have been busy adding dedicatees to our records for printed music when they can. There are currently just over 8,000 historical printed editions in RISM that include a named dedicatee.
The Google spreadsheet below includes these 8,000 editions which you can download here and sort for your own research. Though far from complete, when you throw a table like this into a data manipulation tool such as OpenRefine, insights can be gained that might not be as visible at first glance. Here are just a few.
The composers who included dedications the most often were Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin (with 643 editions with dedications), Ludwig van Beethoven (153), Johann Nepomuk Hummel (108), Stanisław Moniuszko (99), and Hans Huber (80).
Classic composer–dedicatee relationships are here such as Franz Liszt’s dedications to Hans von Bülow (Ungarische Rhapsodie No. 1, RISM ID no. 270002729 and Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (Harmonies poëtiques et religieuses, RISM ID no. 1001087183), or Mozart’s dedicating works to Joseph Haydn (including this set of quartets, RISM ID no. 990044657). In fact, Haydn and Liszt appear on our list as the people who are the target of the most dedications, with 30 and 21 dedications, respectively.
And oddly (or maybe not) there are 78 anonymous pieces dedicated to people. What did Napoléon think of this march or the Archbishop of Mainz Johann Philipp think of these graduales, if they ever found out about these works at all?
Songs as well as music for pianoforte are the kinds of music most often associated with a dedicatee, perfect for the recipient to enjoy in the comfort of their own home. But also funeral music, wedding music, and masses were common genres with dedications.
Have fun with the spreadsheet and see what you can discover. A few technical notes: Some fields contain multiple values, which are separated by semicolons. Attempts were made to standardize place of publication, publisher, and year; where multiple values were present, only the first was taken. The numbers in the headings refer to numbers in our internal cataloging program, but they might be useful to those familiar with MARC21.
Image: Amélie-Julie Candeille, Trois Sonates Pour le Forte Piano ou Clavecin, dedicated to Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie Carignan (Paris, 1786). Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn) VM7-5370. RISM ID no. 990008556. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF (public domain).
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