Martin Eybl’s monograph is a comprehensive study of collecting trends and behaviour surrounding the practice of music during the period in question. The study begins with the reign of Empress Maria Theresa and ends in the final years of the Napoleonic Wars; this is a fraught historical time frame that also coincides with the career of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), a chronological overlap that Eybl openly acknowledges. The author, however, considers this period to be primarily one of revolution, viewing it as an unprecedented time of social upheaval and change in Europe, and he investigates the role music played in documenting and assisting social mobility at this time, specifically in a Viennese context. He maintains that music is the perfect medium through which to track the increased social integration that occurred between court and urban cultures and is thus a viable marker with which to show changes in social structure and class interaction during this time. Throughout the study music is persuasively presented as a powerful and effective means of cultural transfer, reaching different, and often contrasting, levels of society.

In the Introduction, Eybl draws on Jürgen Habermas’s canonical notion of Öffentlichkeit to make his point about changes in the public sphere in the eighteenth century, while convincingly revising Habermas’s suggestion that music had a negligible role in breaking down class structures in society. The author argues that music and music publishing have been grossly overlooked as factors in overcoming class barriers, and that scholarly attention has been primarily directed at the impact that print culture from other fields (literature, for example) had on this social process. Eybl goes to great lengths to rectify this omission, and he aggregates written resources to demonstrate the existence and importance of music publishing in Viennese society and to show the inherent communicative value music had in mediating contact within a traditionally hierarchical society. Eybl argues this point while readily acknowledging that manifestations of an independent musical public sphere (‘die musikalische Öffentlichkeit’) in Vienna were vastly underdeveloped at the time when compared to counterparts in London, Paris and Hamburg. It is, however, clear that despite this lack of development, and the comparatively small amount of activity in this area, these factors do not justify completely disregarding a study of the effects of music in the public sphere.

Although the book integrates discussions of musical tastes, trends and practices, while also considering the use of different instruments in the given time frame, it primarily focuses on music publishing and music manuscripts. Eybl organizes his discussion of these manuscripts in a cohesive way for the reader, drawing on their customary archival classification, but also rearranging existing classifications to make them more accessible to a modern audience. The author here draws on work (and expertise) from an earlier long-standing national research project, entitled Paper and Copyists in Viennese Opera Scores, 1760–1775, which gathered, identified and studied handwritten music manuscripts, systematically organizing the work of local Viennese copyists from 1760 onwards. In some cases, these sources had not been previously (or formally) classified, so Eybl’s work is of foundational value for music scholars, as it not only gathers the manuscripts together, but identifies the manuscripts using authorial information (when available) as well as paper type and watermark. Eybl renders an impressively detailed and coherent analysis of these manuscripts while also actively reshaping the archive of Viennese music publishing through his regrouping and re-presentation of these materials. Such aggregated manuscripts are accompanied by explanatory notes that clarify their provenance and identification, and they are presented to the reader as tables, offering easy oversight of the methods and particularities of music publishing in eighteenth-century Vienna.

By assembling the information in such a way, Eybl is not only generating an important critical resource for scholars of music manuscripts; he also uses this information to shed light on broader social conditions and to illustrate changing trends in sociability and musical taste in this period. By revealing the types of manuscript collected by the various agents involved – and studying the conditions underlying their practical use – the author thus documents more than the possession of sheet music. He recreates musical repertoires and court performances, demonstrating the popularity of certain genres, composers and musical styles. For example, he chronicles the activities of local composers, such as Matthias Georg Monn (1717–1750), whose work may at times be overlooked in conventional scholarship, but whose contribution to the local Viennese scene is indisputable. Attention is also given to practices that flourished in the Viennese musical culture of the eighteenth century. Eybl focuses on the unique status of the Wiener Clavierkonzert (Viennese keyboard concerto) at the time, noting that, as a popular musical form, it helped bridge the gap between court and urban music practice. Significantly, he shows how a study of gathered musical holdings helps convey information about the society of the age, communicating changes in convention and access, while demonstrating the increased social contact occurring between members of different classes – a contact that becomes evident through shared use of musical resources, spaces and talent. Eybl uses current theories on collecting practice to establish these essential points of the study, and he offers a helpful summary of secondary critical resources on the topic for readers.

There is an obvious focus on Habsburg courtly life in the study, and Eybl gives an excellent overview of the decisive impact traditional imperial patronage had on composers, musicians and new musical genres. Eybl focuses on the musical activities of the private chapel of Elisabeth Christine, the widowed mother of Empress Maria Theresa, between 1741 and 1750, demonstrating how such privileged and secluded engagement with music eventually gave way to a more socially diverse, secular bourgeois practice. He provides separate case studies that illustrate the increasingly diverse nature of the bourgeois market and shows an array of different ways in which music was enjoyed and consumed away from the court. One of the case studies is dedicated explicitly to female consumers in the bourgeois music market (‘Frauen der zweiten Gesellschaft’), and this is a welcome gendered approach, as it brings to light not only female participation in music practices of the time, but also (named) female ownership of music manuscripts and supplies, which, in some cases, Eybl has ascertained by studying the ownership notes (‘Besitzvermerke’) made on the archived music scores.

The monograph is accompanied by appendices that contain an inventory of arias and other musical collections discussed in the book. It also contains a substantial bibliography that will facilitate additional study of musical activities in Vienna in the long eighteenth century. Finally, the main argument is supplemented with a range of impressive visual resources (‘Farbtafeln’) that illustrate some of the scores and manuscripts cited, but also show images of the places, people and instruments Eybl discusses. All in all, Sammler*innen: Musikalische Öffentlichkeit und ständische Identität, Wien 1740–1810 is a substantial and valuable contribution towards achieving a better understanding of Viennese music culture in the eighteenth century, and a wonderful resource for scholars studying the period.