Leopoldine Blahetka 1811-1887

[Mark Thomas]

This page is quite a treasure trove of recordings of unsung works by unsung composers: Blahetka, Randhartinger, Mayseder, Mandyczewski and von Neukomm to name just those that interest me. A fascinating find, thank you Thomas.

[Gareth Vaughan]

And one can download the music too, as I discovered. Quite a find. Many thanks.

[Ilja]

As far as I am aware, she always retained her Austrian nationality.

Sorry to be a pedant here (and creating a side tangent; sorry, Alan)...

... but I think it is important to realize until the second third of the 19th century, a unified, formal concept of "nationality" did not really exist in the way it does today. Part of this was that your identity was determined by travel documents you brought with you, usually some letter of introduction hand-written by the political entity you lived at the time (not necessarily the one you were born in). In the beginning of the 19th century, half of Germany was still carrying papers (if they did so in the first place) issued during the Holy Roman Empire before 1806. There was also no unified standard for such papers (although a certain consensus), so such outdated papers were accepted here, rejected there, etc.


In general, however, it was less relevant to determining your nationality as it was to prove what class you belonged to. This changed during the 19th century, but swapping nationalities was quite easy until some time into the 20th century. A case is Reznicek, who moved from Prague to Berlin in 1902 and just "became" German, with all the rights that entailed, fairly easily. Of course, being a nobleman helped tremendously.

This is also the reason why talking about "German" and "Polish" music pre-1918 can be a bit self-defeating. The Scharwenkas were ethnic Poles but cultural Germans; Stojowski was a Russian citizen but a cultural Pole; and Moszkowski was a Russian Pole but a cultural Jew. In the Austrian Empire things got even more complicated.