Publicaciones

Born in Preßburg (today Bratislava), Peter Lichtenthal (1780–1853) studied medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1810 moved to Milan, where he acted as a censor of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. A composer and music theorist by passion (and an early writer on music therapy), he published his seminal first edition of the Dizionario in 1826 (with a reprint in 1836). According to Fétis, who met Lichtenthal in 1841, the Dizionario was the result of 12 years of hard work. Its four volumes are divided into two parts, the first being a music dictionary, the second a general bibliography based on Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s Allgemeine Litteratur der Musik, translated with additions. Lichtenthal’s mission was to create an all-inclusive music encyclopedia, considering the theoretical and practical, the ancient and modern, the anthropological and historical, the aesthetic and philosophical, and not excluding the sciences, particularly physics and mathematics. Although full of factual errors, and being largely a translation of the dictionaries of Gerber (1790–92), Koch (1802), and Castil-Blaze (1821), and the bibliography of Forkel (1792), it is nevertheless a landmark in the development from dilettantism to modern, systematic bibliographic method and contains valuable genre definitions.

The Dizionario universale dei musicisti by the publisher and music historian Carlo Schmidl (1859–1943) is widely recognized as an important early biographical dictionary for Italian musicians. The second edition, published nearly a half-century after the first, constitutes a significant expansion, it contains two volumes rather than the original one and has a supplement. Articles on composers include lists of their works and details of first performances. The Dizionario is especially notable for its articles on Italian literary figures and their relationship to music, a feature uncommon among biographical music dictionaries.