Roger00 Preface

RUDOLF RASCH: MY WORK ON THE INTERNET, VOLUME FOUR
THE MUSIC PUBLISHING HOUSE OF ESTIENNE ROGER AND MICHEL-CHARLES LE CÈNE 1696-1743
PREFACE
RUDOLF RASCH
THE MUSIC PUBLISHING HOUSE OF
ESTIENNE ROGER AND MICHEL-CHARLES LE CÈNE
1696-1743
4 JUNE 2012
Please refer to this page in the following way::

Rudolf Rasch, The Music Publishing House of Estienne Roger and Michel-Charles le Cène 1696-1743
(= My Work on the Internet, Volume Four), Preface, p. 1
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Rudolf.Rasch/personal/Roger00-Preface.pdf
For suggestions, additions, corrections and remarks: r.a.rasch@uu.nl
Version: 4 June 2012 © Rudolf Rasch, Utrecht/Houten, 2012. p. 1
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
Preface
Chapter One: Historical and Biographical

Estienne Roger: background, education; Together with De Lorme; Independent music publisher; Other
publishing activities; Marriage and children; The Jeanne Roger period; Between Roger and Le Cène;
Michel-Charles le Cène; After Le Cène.
Appendix to Chapter 2: Non-music books printed by Roger and Le Cène.
Chapter Two: The Catalogues

Early catalogues 1696-1700; Catalogues with categories 1701-1708; Catalogue 1712; Catalogue 1716;
Catalogue 1725; Catalogue 1735; Catalogue Le Coste 1744.
Chapter Three: Dating

Advertisments; Dating by catalogue; Dating by number
Chapter Four: Output

French airs; Italian ensemble music; Italian sacred music; French opera music; English repertoire; German
instrumental music; Dutch music; Keyboard music; Music theory
Chapter Five: Agents

The Vaillants; Schickhardt; Ballard; Selhof; Other agents.
Chapter Six: Sales

Early catalogues 1698-1708; La Coste Catalogue 1744.
Chapter Seven: Other Publishers

Predecessors: Heus, Pointel, Desrosiers, Le Chevalier; Dutch music publishers around 1700: Anders, Halma,
etc.; Ballard; Walsh; Mortier; Leclerc?

PREFACE
Chapter Eight: The Catalogue
Scope and order; Short title; Full title; Description; Sources; Issues; Reprints; Advertisements; Catalogues;
Prices; Inventory; Contents; Editions; Literature
Conclusion
Bibliography
[PART TWO CATALOGUES IN FACSIMILE]
[PART THREE DOCUMENTS]
1694-1695-1696- ... -1743-1744-1745-1746
PART FOUR: THE CATALOGUE
Abeille- Antoniotti — Babell-Bustijn — Caix-Croft — ... X-Y-Z.

PREFACE
PREFACE
It cannot be denied that the eighteenth century offers a panorama entirely different from the seventeenth
century as it comes to music printing and publishing. The seventeenth-century music publisher did his work
mainly for the local or regioanl, at best for the national market. Thus, Venetian publishers served Italy,
London publishers England, Nuremberg publishers Southern Germany, Leipzig publishers Central Germany,
Hamburg publishers Northern Germany, Paris publishers France, Antwerp publishers the Southern
Netherlands and Amsterdam publishers the Dutch Republic (or the Northern Netherlands). During the
eighteenth-century, however, music printing and publishing was an international trade, with the main
centers, such as Amsterdam, London, Paris, Leipzig, and other cities serving the whole of civilized Europe.
A number of factors have contributed to this difference in scope. First of all, the restrictions of national
musical tastes largely dissappeared after 1700, making place for the Italian style which, headed by Corelli,
spread all over Europe. This internationalizing of musical style and taste made it worhtwile to print and
publish music not for a market limited by cultural borders such as in the seventeenth century, but for an
internal market, crossing many borders of culture and language. The cross-fertilization of musical cultures
among the various European cultural entities was facilitated in addition by the enormous increase in
travelling by musicians, including numerous foreign employments. Musicians of any nationality could be
found in any European country.
Publishing methods underwent a significant change around 1700 too. During the seventeenth century,
most music printing was done with the methods of book printing, which necessitated that the entire needed
stock had to be produced at once, while at the same time the quality of the music printing was not as good as
one should wish. After 1700, at the contrary, most music printing is by way of plate printing, producing a
much better image of the music, and enabling to print small runs, then to wait for the sales, and to reprint
when necessary. An additional advantage was the possibility of correction when reprinting.
It cannot be denied that the Amsterdam-based music publisher Estienne Roger, of French (Huguenot)
descendance, who begun his activities in the music trade in 1696, has played a major role in the
transformation of music publishing from a national to an international affair. More than anyone else had
done before, he build his catalogue on reprinting music for which he expected a need not only in the
Netherlands, but also in England, France, Germany and countries further away. Reprints of French vocal airs
and Italian instrumental sonatas make up the most substantial parts of hus catalogues during the first years of
his enterprise. Musical works by local composers count only for a small minority of his output. Both by the
quality of his plate printing and the effectiveness of his distribution systems (with agents in many major
musical centers in Western and Middle Europe), Roger was able to become - by 1710 - the first or major
publisher of several of the leading composers in Europe, such as Corelli, Albinoni and Vivaldi, as well as of
many composers of a lesser rank such as Dall’Abaco, Mossi and Schickhardt. After his death in 1721 his
business was eventually continued by his son-in-law Michel-Charles le Cène, who run it from 1723 to 1743.
The most important composers of the newer generation attached to Le Cène were Locatelli and Tartini.
When Le Cène died in 1743, about 700 music editions had come from the Roger presses, a considerable
number for that time. One must realize in addition that the large majority of these 700, namely about 600,

PREFACE
were from the twenty-five-year Roger era (1696-1721), with an average of about twenty publications per
annum, and only about 100 from the twenty-year Le Cène era, with an average of about five new
publications per annum. Of course, the Roger production rate would become the standard for the large
music publishing houses in London, Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, etc., but during the years around 1700 it
was quite novel.
A striking innovation carried through by Roger at the very beginning of his career as music publisher is
the frequent issuing of catalogues of available titles. During thes first years of his business there is an
average of four catalogues per annum, a rate slowing down to two or one after 1700, and later via one per
four years (1708, 1712, 1716, 1721, 1725) to one per ten years (1725, 1735, 1744). These catalogues not
only let us securely know the extent of the publishing business (including many titles of editions of which
no extant copies are known), they also assist in dating and provide a lot of other information, such as prices
and availability.
In order to manage these massive quantities of plate-printed music, Roger introduced the habit of
numbering plates, somewhere around 1712, becoming apparent to the outside world in his catalogue of
1716. It is hardly possible to overestimate the significance of this move for the organisation of music
printing during the eighteenth and later centuries.
All these observations taken together, it seems justified to undertake a complete mapping of the music
publishing and distributing activities of Estienne Roger and his direct successor, Michel-Charles le Cène in
the first place, in a way comparable to studies of earlier music printers, such as that by Heartz of Attaignant,
by Lesure of Le Roy and Ballard, by ... of ..., by Vanhulst of Phalèse (Louvain period), etc., with a detailed
listing of all publications with data on production, dissemination, contents, etc.
Of course, I am not the first ones studying Roger’s work. Earlier interest in Roger’s publishing business
was fed by interest in the history of pirnting in the Netherlands (Enschedé, Van Eeghen), interest in Corelli
(Pincherlé) or interest in music printing in general (Lesure). As a matter of fact, the enterprise presented
here could probably not have been undertaken efficiently without the survey given in François Lesure’s
Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Estienne Roger et Michel-Charles le Cène (Amsterdam,
1696-1743), published in 1969. In this publication, Lesure sketches Roger’s biography, makes a first attempt
to give a full account of the catalogues, presents an alphabetical list of editions mentioned in 1716 Roger
catalogue (the first one with publisher’s numbers), and reproduces the 1735 Le Cène catalogue in facsimile.
Everyone studying any aspect of Roger’s publishing is indebted to this landmark publication.
An important follow-up to Lesure’s book of 1969 was provided by Klaus Hortschansky’s article `Die
Datierung der frühen Musikdrucke Etienne Rogers: Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen’ in Tijdschrift van de
Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 22 (1972). In this article, Hortschansky resumed the study
of the `early’ Roger catalogues (upto 1708) and arranged them in a seemingly complete and convincingly
dated order. Hortschansky’s article is a necessary complement to Lesure’s ground-breaking work.
But all studies concerning Roger’s music publishing share one shortcoming on a rather fundamental
level, and that is in that they make use of only resticted areas of information. Van Eeghen’s work is mainly
based on archival material (life data, notarial acts, etc.) and newspaper advertisements. The work by Lesure
and Hortschansky is first of all based on catalogues, with other sorts of information (mainly advertisements)
as secondary. None of these authors have tried to connect the information present in catalogues and

PREFACE
advertisment with the editions themselves, a situation that has lead to a curious gap between the biblio-
graphical information about Roger’s publishing and the knowledge around the extant musical editions of
Roger’s presses. The studies by Lesure and Hortschansky contain virtually no references to extant copies of
the editions they mention, while on the other hand vital data of extant copies (such as date of publishing and
who was the publisher) is more often than not wrongly given, not only in library catalogues but even in
specialized bibliographical works, such as the RISM volumes and Marx’s bibliographie of Corelli’s works.
Considering the sketched situation of `Roger knowledge’ it seems time try to present an integrated
corpus of information about the musical publications of Estienne Roger, that is, a presentation of data in
which all the available sources of information are comprised, such as the already mentioned catalogues,
advertisements, extant copies, and archival documents. Among the latter catagory aspecially the inventory of
Le Cène’s estate, made up after his death in 1743, should be mentioned. This source, with a per title listing
of the material present, has not yet been utilized by any author at all.
By all this, the idea of an all-comprehensive Roger catalogue is easily born and, be it somewhat less
easily, worked out into a practicle and feasible plan. From the observation given above, it should be easily
accepted that such a Roger catalogue should comprise the following sorts of information for each title
included: title, physical description (pages, sizes, partbooks), source editions, issues, reprints (by other
publishing houses), extant copies, catalogue listings, advertisements, price inventory information, contents,
facsimile and modern editions, literature, remarks, and all this in a well-defined an efficient way.
The scope of the catalogue appeared to be less easily to define than one would expect. The core of
Roger’s business consists, of course, of editions printed, published, and sold by himself. But on a number of
occasion Roger bought editions from other publishing houses, often after they had finisihed their businesses
for whatever reason. Often Roger incorporated these editions in his own lists and catalogues, while copies
were sometimes retailed with new or only adapted title pages, mentioning Roger (or Le Cène) as publisher.
In addition, a number of catalogues mention titles expressly not printed by Roger, but only sold by him,
while also the 1743 inventory provides a number of titles not from the Roger/Le Cène presses. We have
made the decision to include in our catalogue all the titles that can be connected with the Roger business,
either by publication or by availability or possession. As such, our catalogue shows the true extent of the
richness and variety of the Roger/Le Cène business.
Rudolf Rasch,
Utrecht/Houten, 4 June 2012

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RUDOLF RASCH: MY WORK ON THE INTERNET, VOLUME FOUR

THE MUSIC PUBLISHING HOUSE OF

ESTIENNE ROGER AND MICHEL-CHARLES LE CÈNE

Please refer to this page in the following way::

Chapter One: Historical and Biographical

Appendix to Chapter 2: Non-music books printed by Roger and Le Cène.

Chapter Two: The Catalogues

Chapter Three: Dating

Chapter Four: Output

Chapter Five: Agents

Chapter Six: Sales

Chapter Seven: Other Publishers

Please refer to this page in the following way::

[PART TWO CATALOGUES IN FACSIMILE]

[PART THREE DOCUMENTS]

1694-1695-1696- ... -1743-1744-1745-1746

PART FOUR: THE CATALOGUE

Abeille- Antoniotti — Babell-Bustijn — Caix-Croft — ... X-Y-Z.

Please refer to this page in the following way::

Please refer to this page in the following way::

Please refer to this page in the following way::

Please refer to this page in the following way::

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