IMSLP Forums

HI. I've been playing over Joseph Wolfl's pianos scores. He's pretty good, might be great. Anybody want to upload them and start him on a new career?
Matty

Are they already scanned?

I have a privately scanned copy of some of his music I made from Beethoven and his Rivals or some such title, a great book, a made for my own nefarious purpose, playing it, back in the 80s. Since then things have happened. There are some CD recordings of Wolfl now.these pianists had to play from something. I did google it a while ago and saw some of his scores in at a college library. I suspect since he lived in England his scores were published there. I did think since IMSLP has so many scores I've enjoyed on the level of Kalkbrenner whoever can find those delightful but erratic scores maybe can find Wolfl. It's on the same level: not impeccably organized but wow, when it has its moments it's fine stuff.

The right spelling is Woelfl - not Wölfl.

You can listen to samples played by Laure Colladant here:
http://teemix.aufeminin.com/w/musique/d ... aphie.html

The British Lybrary:
http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestyp ... llcat.html
holds quite few Sonatas.

If a library is fussy about posting its holdings on IMSLP I would be ready to retypeset some of these Sonatas if someone can obtain photocopies of the 1800-or-so editions.

Incidentally I just bought 3 Sonatas op.33 from Editions Delatour. It has a ring binding and
copyright warnings!

I've seen both spellings of Wolfl in books and on Google: Wolfl and Woelfl. It's mostly Wolfl. We don't have an umlaut in English.In the book where I first found Wolfl the editor points out that what singles out Beethoven is his ability to organize. Composers like Wolfl had plenty of talent. I think that's an interesting take on part of the nature of genius. Maybe that's why Beethoven did so many rewrites.His seemingly hasty music like the Piano Fantasy in G Minor or the Choral Fantasy aren't particularly well organized.the music doesn't feel Berlioz put it, surprising but inevitable. I think this is also true of Mendelssohn except here are many more pieces that could have used another draft. One of the qualities that separates Beethoven and Mendelssohn from Wolfl is possibly that no matter how much Wolfl rewrote he couldn't organize as well as these two guys.Still .Wolfl is fun ,easy to sight read, and nenver disappoints one as long as one doesn't want him to be Beethoven or Mendelssohn. He certainly is better than John Field. I'm glad to hear somebody has found his piano music and hopefully is ready to scan it.

I found and downloaded some Wolfl trios in the Bayerische Staatsbibliotek at the Menchener Digitalissat Bestilung. I'm probably spelling it wrong but this is I think that huge building in Munich: the Munich Library. This is an incredible site.I think these people are digitalizing their entire library. They have a lot of English material. Wow! By the way the famous novelist Franz Werfel might have been a relation for all I know. Werfel in British English sounds like Wolfl with an umlaut.

Well, I am glad to see i am not the only one who plays and enjoys this composer.

Every now and again, one comes across a composer and is puzzled as to why his works are rarely if at all played. Thankfully, some of the sonatas, trios, concertos and symphonies have now been recorded, but it amounts to only a small fraction of his output.

In my opinion the first piano concerto is a gem.

Thal

I'm glad to hear about other people who look to enjoy talent like Joseph Wolfl . Thanks. My own view is that music operates on different values than money; when one is playing an intelligent and gifted composer like Wolfl one is in initmate resonance with somebody whose very spirit is a kind of standard for oneself. It's a moral benchmark. One needs such people to nurture the living whether the Wolfls
themselves are living or dead. I'm very unhappy that IMSLP has gone though such persecution from publsihers, none of whom are paying a penny of royalties to the composer. As the executor of an estate of a well known Americian composer I've had to surreptitiously copy some of his scores to get them easily to pianists. Creative spriits die twice, but are resurrected once: when they are in PD. Halelujah!

HolyCity, As executor of a composer's estate, would you not have some legal authority to force a publisher make the composer's works available? It's really incredibly disgraceful - not to mention unethical - for a publisher to sit upon a composer's work, failing to both pay royalties and even make the work available to those who want it. We welcome all manner or new and copyrighted works here using one of the Creative Commons licenses or even our own performance-restricted variant thereof. All the publisher has to do is upload a score here under one of the above-mentioned licenses. Once here, it's available 24 x 7 x 365 worldwide to anyone with an internet connection. You can even put in a direct link to the publisher's website, and we can even add a link to SheetMusicPlus for anyone who would like to buy a copy. I do wish some publishers would stop thinking of IMSLP as the enemy.

I'm patient. I'm not worried. I'm sure of few things but one of them is that IMSLP and sites like it are going to replace the means of distribution of music. Copyrights turn to PD as caviar becomes dung.. Suits about scans will inspire somebody to come up with a scanning program that will read scans and turn them into printed scores looking like Sibelius. Nobody will be able to sue or complain about IMSLP; there will be no visible trace of the source. Contemporary composers will post their scores directly as currently Frederic Resewski does on Werner Icking. North Korea will stop making atomic bombs and replace Russia.ru. There are right now some intriguing sites on .ru if they are in Cyrillic. This thing can't be stopped. I still have my Olivetti because I'm sentimental. At bottom the enemy of music isn't greedy and miserly publishers but the decline in the ability in the world to read music, or to read and think, period. A new technology made the careers of Mahler, Alkan and Zelenka possible.There is no human culture without music. We are programmed to want it. IMSLP and sites like it give it better than anybody. It's like standing in the way of the bow and arrow. We do need new laws to manage the excesses of new technologies but in the interim lawlessness and its consequent repair to nature isn't the worst of circumstances.Ive been giving to people including my son my guitar file. It has nothing from North Korea but a lot from Iceland. One can't talk it over with dinosoars. There's nothing to talk about. Does any publishing company of anybody holding any copyright at all benefit from it? Are their lives changed? do they eat one more hamburger? One of my friends who wrote a book about Virgill Thomson said he is lucky he is long lived or he might have died waiting for the lawyers for the estate to answer his letters. Virgil told me he was pleased when people stole his scores. It meant that they valued them enough to take a risk to get them. All things get resolved. That's entropy.

A few things have just shown up at Bavarian state library:
http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/

thalbergmad wrote:Well, I am glad to see i am not the only one who plays and enjoys this composer [...]

If you are the same thalbergmad as in http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=50124.0 ? Then please [re-]read viewtopic.php?t=991&start=15 and viewtopic.php?t=2442 and review your position about your posting the Op.54 Sonatas provided by the British Library.