The album is kept in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig (accession number A/2013/390). It has been digitised at the CSMC as part of the project ‘Creating Music Albums as Originals Made of Originals’. The relatively large-format but thin book – it measures 25.5 × 34.5 cm (landscape) and contains only 15 leaves – belonged to Marie Pohlenz from Leipzig, daughter of the Gewandhauskapellmeister Christian August Pohlenz. Little is known about the album owner: in 1848 she was accepted as a student at the Leipzig conservatory, and in September 1850 and May 1851 there is evidence of her taking part in the conservatory’s public examinations in choral singing and piano playing. In later years she is said to have worked as a teacher in Leipzig.
The contents of the album point to the environment of the Leipzig conservatory, too: A total of seventeen entries were noted in the album. The earliest dated entry is by the composer Niels W. Gade and was written in summer 1850, when Gade was in Leipzig to attend the premiere of Robert Schumann’s Genoveva; the last dated entry was written by the Berlin conductor and composer Wilhelm Taubert in autumn 1853. Almost all entries were made in Leipzig. Many of the teachers of the conservatory active at the time of Pohlenz’s studies – all important personalities also of Leipzig’s public musical life and for the most part known far beyond Leipzig – have inscribed themselves in the album. These are: Ignaz Moscheles, pianist, composer and conductor, who was head of the piano class at the conservatory; Moritz Hauptmann, a music theorist and composer, was Thomaskantor and teacher of music theory and composition; the cellist and composer Julius Rietz was Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Stadttheater, conductor of the Singakademie and musical director of the Gewandhaus concerts, he also taught composition at the conservatory; the music theorist and composer Ernst Friedrich Richter was organist at St Peter’s Church and a regular teacher of harmony and counterpoint from as early as 1843; the music teacher Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel taught piano; the violinist and composer Ferdinand David was concertmaster at the Gewandhaus Orchestra and taught violin at the conservatory; Raimund Dreyschock and the still very young Joseph Joachim were his direct colleagues at both institutions.
Andreas Grabau is another Gewandhaus musician who added an entry, and there is one by the singer and actor Heinrich Behr. Ludvig Norman and Robert Radecke, on the other hand, were fellow students of Pohlenz at the conservatory. The reason why Marie Polenz only asked these two for an entry is not clear. Entries from the album owner’s family environment are limited to those of her two brothers Emil and Paul. Only the entries of Taubert and the music teacher and composer Gustav Wilhelm Teschner cannot be traced back to the album owner’s Leipzig environment: Taubert was Kapellmeister at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Teschner worked in Berlin as a singing teacher.
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The images of “Music Album of Marie Pohlenz” may only be used in connection with the CSMC project “The Music Album of the Leipzig Pianist and Singer Marie Pohlenz as a Document of Music-Making in the Private Sphere” (https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/album.html). Any publication of the images online, in print or any other media format, requires written permission by Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig.
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The research on the Music Album of Marie Pohlenz was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.
