Hunter, Lee Halbert. (2023). The Operatic Guitar: A Study of Selected Pieces From Opern-Revue, Op. 8 by Josef Kaspar Mertz (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).

Josef Kaspar Mertz was one of the premier guitarists and composers of the mid-nineteenth century. Although his music fell out of favor after his death, there has been a renewed interest in his compositions in recent decades. However, extant scholarship has been primarily restricted to a handful of pieces from his prolific output. This dissertation will broaden the conversation on Mertz and his contributions to Romantic music by using his Opern-Revue, Op. 8, a collection of thirty-three pieces based on operatic themes, to examine the nineteenth-century musical landscape. In the Biedermeier era (1815-1848), the guitar experienced a surge of popularity with the rise of the middle class; however, by the time Mertz arrived in Vienna in 1841, the guitar was on the decline as it began to be replaced by the piano. The guitar and the piano had played similar roles in early nineteenth-century musical life as solo or ensemble instruments used in both private and public spheres, and there likely was some stylistic exchange among the music composed for the two instruments. As the century progressed, the piano supplanted the guitar in both realms, and the guitar’s place in the musical landscape of the nineteenth century has since been largely neglected. As a result, the majority of scholarship on operatic...