Joseph Merk (1795–1852) was a celebrated cellist in Vienna, where his virtuosity earned him a place at the Imperial Court. He is mainly remembered for his cello works, especially the 20 exercices pour le violoncelle, op.11: Composés et dédiés à son ami François Schubert par Jos. Merk, which are still part of the cello curriculum. The main attraction in this selection of his works is the Fleurs d'Italie, fantasies and variations on melodies from Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, Lucia di Lammermoor, Torquato Tasso, Dom Sébastien and Verdi's Ernani. The album also includes the Air suisse varié et rondeau and a collection entitled Valse brillantes. There is no great music here, although it is certainly competent; the pieces are a cellist's pleasure, intended for enjoyment at home, among like-minded, skilled players and listeners attuned to the popular entertainments of the day. The performances by Rummel and Krüger are quite beautiful, but listened to as a whole, the album is wearying in its familiarity, overuse of the same tonalities and compositional techniques. One should nonetheless admire Merk's adept writing for the instrument; cellists will want to have this album and thereafter seek out published versions of the parts.

There is much to be learned from Merk's pieces, especially as they exemplify several social and compositional trends of the first half of the nineteenth century. Viewed broadly, the era did not produce an enormous amount of literature for the cello (as opposed to the latter half of the century, which generated repertory works by Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Dvořák). Notable contributions by well-known composers of Merk's time include Beethoven's Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1814), unique for its performing forces, and his six duo sonatas with piano; a pair of sonatas by Mendelssohn (1838 and 1843); Chopin's Introduction and Polonaise brillante (1831, dedicated to Merk) and his mostly unremarkable sonata (1846, dedicated to Auguste Franchomme); but thereafter, only the Schumann Cello Concerto from 1850 earns a place in the repertoire. (I would not include Schubert's Sonata in A Minor [‘Arpeggione’, 1824], for the obvious reason that it wasn't written for cello, although modern cellists do like to show off with it.) One path less studied is the opera house, where there are at least two compositions that demand exceptional mastery of the cello: Rossini's Overture to Guillaume Tell (1829) and Verdi's Prelude to I Masnadieri, the latter performed at its London premiere by the famous cellist Alfredo Piatti. Piatti was one of a remarkable number of great cellist-composers of the period, among them Bernhard Romberg (1767–1841), Friedrich Dotzauer (1783–1860), Auguste Franchomme (1808-84) and Adrien Servais (1807–66), who had mastered the virtuosic and largely Italianesque cello literature of the generation immediately preceding: the concertos of Haydn and Boccherini as well as numerous sonatas by Locatelli, Valentini, Sammartini and Marcello. Not surprisingly, these cellist–composers were also pedagogues, who wrote cello methods in addition to numerous concertos, occasional pieces, sonatas and concertinas, most of which are known and appreciated today only by cellists.

From the social and commercial angle, Merk's Fleurs d'Italie, may be seen as an artefact of the opera industry and its intercourse with the public at large. Sets of variations like these conjure up two common and contemporary axioms: ‘Do it yourself!’ and ‘Try this at home!’ While the phrases are doubtless of modern English origin, they also speak for early nineteenth-century society, every bit as commerce-driven as today's in its efforts to sell the consumer on the idea that an extraordinary experience can be duplicated on one's own. Possession (or the promise of it) is a powerful elixir, and such desires have continued to animate collectors. The entertainment business was (and remains) a system that catered to a public that craved repetition in the theatre and at home and had the money to make it happen. Impresarios, publishers and the media sustained it with cunning and even, at times, great intelligence.

Transcriptions of opera constitute a phase in the life of a work once it leaves the theatre, a small, but powerful, niche enterprise.Footnote ¹ Opera publishers like Ricordi, Artaria and Lucca, who built their empires on the backs of the younger Rossini and Verdi, were extremely savvy about identifying the best opportunities for profit – not in ticket sales as much as in operatic by-products. Along with piano–vocal scores of operas, publishers offered numerous fantasies, caprices, waltzes, homages, divertissements, ‘pensieri’, ‘delizie’, souvenirs, marches and quadrilles on opera melodies for every combination of instruments. Most of these take-aways for private use were by composers who have since fallen into the dustbin of history, the likes of Tutsch, Billet, Briccialdi, Duvernoy, Labitzky, Della Vecchia and Truzzi. The number and variety of these salon pieces testify to the continued popularity of the operas of the period.

While Merk himself was not involved in anything equivalent to the Ricordi or even the Lucca sweatshops, his riffs on Donizetti and Verdi nonetheless share much in common with that operatic gristmill and with the anthologies of popular melodies (unfamiliar bits removed) hawked on late-night television today. More than a century removed from their theatrical premieres, these melodies have been recontextualized, and, it could be said, stripped of content. The Fleurs d'Italie makes no attempt to recreate the drama of the works that inspired its individual parts, relying instead, on the immediacy they would hold for first-generation listeners. In Merk's hands, Donizetti's (and Verdi's) melodies are thus raw material, an opportunity for virtuosic display probably intended in the vein of Liszt's opera paraphrases, but far less adept technically and absent Liszt's musical insight. The clearest demonstration of this is the Lucia set. After a brilliant introduction, the cellist begins with the end of the opera, Edgardo's final scene, here completely lacking narrative function as well as the character's pathos or desperation. But that void is also a consequence of Merk's formal choices – variation, medley, fantasy – and narrow focus on melody, obstacles to the drama by design. We should not probe these pieces too deeply for semantic meaning, but rather enjoy them for the particular kind of aesthetic pleasure for which they were intended.