Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

As curious stories go, Joseph Kaspar Mertz's is odder than most. Born in Pressburg (Bratislava) during the Napoleonic Wars. Provincial teacher. Cathedral habitué. Occasional concerts. Then, come 1840, Vienna staging the moment, the re-invented man. Mid-thirties. Composer-virtuoso. Music in print. Flowers of the Fatherland, Carnival of Venice. Opus 1-6. Dead two months into his fifty-first year. Last of the grand Biedermeier guitarists - briefly celebrated, long forgotten - JK was Vienna's voice of pearly nostalgia. What little we know about him is confined principally to a truncated fin de siècle memoir by his widow published in America near enough forty years after his death; and to a copiously researched modern thesis/catalogue by Astrid Stempnik. Willing otherwise to address lesser luminaries, the standard English and German dictionaries (Baker's and Österreichisches Musiklexikon excepted) puzzlingly omit reference to...