The Periodicals of Ferdinand Pelzer, 1833–1857

The title-page image from The Giulianiad, or, Guitarist’s Monthly Magazine (1833). Appleby Collection, Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Sarah Clarke’s The Periodicals of Ferdinand Pelzer, 1833–1857 is a major contribution to guitar scholarship. It comprises an overview of Pelzer’s varied career in late Georgian/early Victorian Britain; meticulously referenced, full-text editions of the three publications in which Pelzer had an editorial role; and a wealth of instructive visual and bibliographic material.

On 29th January, Ally Dunavant and I will perform at the launch event for Sarah’s book, hosted by the London Record Society and the Library of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The programme will feature solo guitar music by Pelzer and his daughter Catharina (better known as Madame Sidney Pratten), Giuliani Lieder, and a selection of songs from the Giulianiad guitar journal – all played or accompanied on a beautiful Panormo guitar from 1840. Books can be purchased on the night for the heavily discounted price of £25.

In advance of the launch, I asked Sarah a few questions. The fruits of our discussion are below.

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Declan Hickey: Ferdinand Pelzer is not (for now!) a familiar name to every guitarist. How did you come to focus your research on Pelzer and his periodicals?

Sarah Clarke: I’ve long been interested in the guitar in nineteenth-century London. There is no doubt that the Pelzer family dominated the Victorian guitar world in London, and Ferdinand Pelzer was the patriarch of the family. I became a bit more focused when I had the privilege of spending time with the Appleby Collection of guitar music that is held in the library of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. It is a marvellous collection and among the most important for guitar researchers. It contains some rare items including a volume of periodicals that Pelzer was almost certainly editing. It is the text from these periodicals that I have transcribed for my book.

DH: Much ink has been spilled over the particular question of the Giulianiad editorship. Perhaps you could clarify things: how confident can we be that Ferdinand Pelzer edited the Giulianiad?

SC: The Giulianiad is the first periodical in the volume; it dates from the 1830s. As was the custom then, the editor(s) aren’t named. I go into this quite a bit in the introduction to my book, and am pretty certain that Pelzer had a hand in it. I think that there were probably others working with him, and that the team changed over the short span of the journal. This would help account for the inconsistent content. In reality, it would probably be hard to distinguish between formal editors and fellow musicians offering advice. London was very much smaller then than it is today – many of the guitarists lived close to each in an area roughly east of Regent Street. To the north of this half way up Albany Street there were open fields which weren’t far from the farm called Chalk Farm. These guitarists would have seen each other often and visited the same pubs. There must have been many informal conversations.

DH: Like most 19th-century musicians in Britain, Pelzer had a varied career. Where do you think he most excelled, and/or what was his greatest contribution?

SC: Pelzer didn’t seem to be a great performer on the guitar; there is a suggestion that he suffered from nerves. I think he most stood out as a teacher. He had, after all, taught his own daughters, and their careers testify to his skill: three became professional guitarists, and another, Annie, was an accomplished concertina player. The best known of them was the guitarist Catharina (Madame Sidney Pratten after her marriage). It is worth remembering that his guitar method books had a long life and were still being advertised and presumably used at the end of the nineteenth century. Pelzer’s commitment to teaching is particularly well illustrated by his choral teaching in the 1840s. His periodical The Musical Herald in my book concerns this work and is followed by three leaflets that include carefully gathered press reports of his classes. He comes across as a very charismatic teacher.

DH: By comparison, are today's musicians over-specialised?

SC: It might make an interesting research project to compare how nineteenth- and twenty-first-century musicians specialise(d). I don’t know that greater specialisation is necessarily a bad thing.

DH: What impression do you have of Pelzer the man, as opposed to Pelzer the musician?

SC: Finding out about Pelzer the man is not so easy because we do not have many primary resources. The two main ones are the biography of Catharina by Frank Mott Harrison, and the ‘Memoirs’ of another daughter, Giulia. They both apparently consist of what two quite elderly women could, and chose to, remember. They both need to be treated with some caution. I think Pelzer might have been a little uncompromising and may have had a difficult relationship with his eldest daughter, Catharina, who had been a child prodigy taught by him. Their differing approaches as she became a young adult can be seen in their two method books for the guitar tuned in E major. They were both published at about the same time in the mid-1850s. Catharina very roughly said that her book was for beginners, and as this tuning was easier than the usual tuning it was good for those who didn’t have much time to practise. On the other hand, her father made it clear that his book was for students who had mastered playing the guitar in the usual tuning first, and should not be used by beginners at all. I sometimes wonder if the two of them ever discussed their approaches!

DH: How did you find the research process as a whole? Do you have any advice for budding researchers in this field?

SC: I’ve enjoyed researching very much and I am grateful to the many people who have helped. I’m not sure what advice I could give to another researcher, except perhaps that research will invariably take at least twice as long as you think it might do when you start out! 

DH: What are you most looking forward to about the book launch on 29th January?

SC: I’m most looking forward to the concert by Declan and Ally of course! Their programme of music which reflects the career and legacy of Ferdinand Pelzer will be very special.

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Further details of the launch event can be found here.