Casa Ricordi

Giovanni Ricordi, a violinist, leader of a small orchestra in Milan, as well as "a genius and positive force in the history of Italian opera," in 1803 had a firm, a copisteria, which specialized in producing manuscript copies of music for local music groups, and very quickly, he became official copyist for two theatres. He entered into what became a short-term partnership with Felice Festa, an engraver and music seller, but that ended in June 1808.

The first work, which the new company published in 1808, was a guitar piece by Antonio Nava. This was followed in 1814 by the first catalogue, which contained 143 items.

The 1814 catalogue included mostly piano arrangements of operatic tunes and some individual numbers as well as pieces for guitars, but Macnutt notes the most important single inclusion as being the complete vocal score of Simon Mayr's 1806 opera, Adelasia ed Aleramo, which was regularly performed at La Scala until 1820.

Throughout these years he was acutely aware of the limitations of copyright law, as varied as it was throughout both the country and the continent. While he was able to secure performance rights to individual numbers and then, engraving them onto copper plates, easily make reproductions from there, he found that the full orchestral scores were still guarded in Italy, although German and French

publishers were printing entire scores with impunity.

In fact, in regard to the printing of full scores in Italy, Macnutt in his article "Publishing" in Sadie, notes that: "The full scores published in Italy in the first half of the century were eight Rossini scores printed in lithography by [two rival publishers] Ratti Cencetti & Comp. in Rome in the 1820s and a single Bellini opera, Beatrice di Tenda, published by Pittarrelli about 1833, also in Rome."

It was through the gradual accession to the rights to control La Scala's archives, as well as subsequently-produced operas, that he was able to bypass the limitations on publishing full scores, and—as Gossett notes—"not be its employee but a private entrepreneur from whom theatres rented materials". In contrast, many of Ricordi's competitors produced "hackwork manuscripts" in no way based on the composers' autographs. In 1844, the company produced its "Gran Catalogo", which focused on music for the theatre, and included the work of what it called its "house composers," which included Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti and Verdi.

In addition, another of Giovanni's strategies was to acquire—beyond just the publishing rights—the right to represent the composers to the opera companies and theatres that would present their work, so that successive performances elsewhere would bring in additional royalties. In that way, Giovanni and his successors acquired more-or-less total rights to their composers' works. As Rossini's operas gave way to those of Bellini, the rise of Donizetti followed until his death, and then the preeminence of Verdi, the position of each composer was strengthened by this growing strategy.