Journal of Music Criticism 9 (2025)

This essay explores life and work of the German music critic Heinrich Ehrlich (1822-1899), using as key sources his autobiography and his novel Kunst und Handwerk (1861). The objective is to gain insight in Ehrlich’s views on the functions and objectives of music criticism and to analyse how his professional writing mirrors them. For Ehrlich it was clear that music criticism was not an isolated form of journalistic writing. The ethical standards that governed social life were also relevant for music criticism. Moreover, the judgement of music, compositions as well as performance, needed to be connected to current social and political developments. This means that Ehrlich’s monograph Lebenskunst und Kunstleben (1884) was in his opinion not just an inquiry into the art of living and its application in artistic life: it provided the ethical backbone for music criticism. The connection between music on the one hand and social and political considerations on the other also comes to the fore when dealing with the subject of anti-Semitism. Ehrlich was open about his Jewish background and felt compelled to include a discussion of contemporary anti-Jewish sentiment in both his autobiography as well as his remarks about the goals and functions of music criticism. In pursuing this agenda, in which music criticism is never isolated from its wider contexts, Ehrlich’s writings constitute a fascinating contribution to nineteenth-century music criticism.

In October 1905, the painter Lluís Graner, in his new role as an entrepreneur and stage programmer, settled in Barcelona’s Principal Theatre. Under the name Espectacles-Audicions Graner, his company was the first attempt at long-term institutionalisation of the Catalan lyric theatre movement: an initiative that emerged to fill a significant lack of Catalan lyric repertoire, a lack regarded by Catalan nationalism as a crucial deficiency in its nation-building project. Like the rest of the Catalan lyric movement, the new company was characterised by the active involvement of its entrepreneurs and the search for symbolic value rather than economic capital. Consequently, Lluís Graner committed his personal wealth to this cause, disregarding the balance of his accounts and making substantial investments to produce superior quality shows that would elevate Catalan theatre to the rank of ‘art’. The artist’s predilection was the ‘musical visions’ genre, which he sought to consolidate in collaboration with Adrià Gual as stage director, based on the staging of folk songs and romances under a symbolist dramaturgy. Despite that, the company ultimately embraced a broader range of lyric genres according to the diversity of the Catalan lyric theatre movement. The absorption of other lyrical institutions, such as the Foment del Teatre Líric Català, and the extensive network of contacts and collaborations with other cultural institutions and civil associations, demonstrate Graner’s desire to unify the Catalan cultural movement around his company. The inevitable bankruptcy of Lluís Graner after his theatrical adventure and his subsequent exile, along with the fire at the Principal Theatre a short time later, resulted in the dispersal of the painter’s documentary legacy among diverse collections and archives. It has now been examined as a whole to analyse his business and artistic management of the Principal Theatre. An extensive newspaper revision also allows for an evaluation of the critical reception of the company and the attitudes adopted by the press.

Throughout the 19^th century, lyric theatre became the quintessential Spanish leisure activity, configuring, for this purpose, an entire structure that involved every agent of the creative process — composers and librettists, performers, public, critics, theatres and entrepreneurs — and this was even more evident during the years in which the Género Chico maintained its hegemony in the Spanish capital. In this respect, the Apolo Theatre in Madrid stood out from the formidable competition posed by the various theatres in the Spanish capital thanks to its firm and unwavering commitment to the zarzuela genre from as early as 1886 until the end of the first decade of the 20^th century, serving as the stage for the premieres of some of the most emblematic works of the genre. However, this success would not have been possible without the crucial role played by the various impresarios in its management. During the heyday of the hourly theatre, the Apolo, considered the ‘Cathedral’ of the zarzuela, became the flagship of this new theatrical format thanks to the decisions made by impresarios Felipe Ducazcal, Enrique Arregui, and Luis Aruej, who knew how to reinvent themselves and bring a pragmatic vision to the business that allowed them to maintain both their artistic and economic performance for almost a quarter of a century. The main objective of this article is to delve into some decisions made at the Apolo Theatre in Madrid between 1886 and 1913, in order to offer a more concrete view of the activities and manoeuvres carried out by the managers in relation to premieres, dealings with literary authors and composers, and issues related to management, which in most previous research have been overshadowed in favour of artistic factors.