Music Circulating Libraries in France: An Overview and a Preliminary List

The year is 1867 in Paris during the Second Empire. A musician sets off one day from his flat in a building several centuries old situated on the north side of the city. He is mulling over finances, and he feels lucky to have the place. Though the building is six floors tall with a narrow spiral staircase, the ground floor apartment was available when he was looking, and the piano movers were just able to shoehorn in his forty year-old Erard piano. He has a package under his arm, and he is on a mission, but he pauses upon emerging from his narrow street onto the great boulevard. He glances up at the magnificent arch dividing the boulevard at Porte St. Denis and then heads west toward the Opéra where he is employed as an opera coach. As he walks, his mind turns to finances. Some calculation in his head divides his monthly salary. Almost three-quarters goes toward food and another quarter to his apartment, fuel, and clothes, leaving little for everything else. The scores that he deeply desires cost around fifteen francs, too much for him to spend in his quest to keep up with the latest operas. A fellow musician is visiting tonight, as he does weekly, so they can play and sing some opera music. They are hoping to work through a piano-vocal score they had seen advertised in a recent edition of Le ménestrel, Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, which had been first performed last November. Some music, some gossip and good fellowship—that is his hope for the evening. He continues down the boulevard, glances in the pâtisserie, passes the butcher, and turns in at his goal, the shop of Léon Grus. Grus has an especially lovely shop, and well placed. He sells pianos and scores, a few other instruments, and sundries, such as candles and music paper. The musician bypasses the displays, though, and heads to the end of the counter. Here is the abonnement de musique, the music circulating library, where he has been a member since before the old man died and his son took over. Last month he paid his annual subscription of thirty francs, and this enables him to borrow three scores per week, which he does regularly, like clockwork. The proprietor chats with him, and the man hands him the package he has been carrying. Grus glances quickly through the scores, but he knows his customer and knows that there will be no missing pages or penciled markings in the scores being returned. The musician is happy to hear that Grus has just received in his shop several piano-vocal scores of the Thomas opera, and the proprietor quickly prepares one for the abonnement—placing a sticker on the front cover and preparing a checkout card for his files. The man makes several other choices for the week and then exits the shop, continuing on his way to give a piano lesson to the daughter of a petty official. If the girl’s parents think an ability to play piano will help her on the marriage market, so much the better, because the girl actually has some talent and is a diligent student. Her parents took his suggestion to present her with a subscription to a music circulating library as an étrenne, or New Year’s gift, and she has been spending time sight-reading the scores she borrows. The abonnements de musique as characterized in the preceding scenario, also known as cabinets de lectures musicals, or, in English, music circulating libraries, were businesses that loaned music scores to subscribers. In France the life span of the institution was roughly a century and a half, from the end of the eighteenth century until the 1950s. In this article we describe the businesses as they existed in France, give some ideas about their patronage, and present a preliminary list of firms. We will see that music circulating libraries illustrate the functional nature of business, where a new enterprise can spring up to fill a need in the marketplace and then fade away when no longer needed. We also infer that these libraries played a significant role in the dissemination of music, allowing people to rent music which they could not afford to buy.