The Voracious Wikipedian: Fantaisie "Baillante" sur des motifs de l'Opéra "Goria", Op. 28 edit
Character and mood edit
Goria was a person of remarkable personality. He spoke little but observed well enough to understand that it would be easier for him to "copy" rather than simply express his feelings through music and not transcribe it as a fantasia "baillante". About Goria's family or his childhood little is known. The only point to note is his special character and his vocation for music. In most small prodigies of fragile nature with a precocious and unhealthy sensitivity, Goria was a beautiful child, chubby, robust, who liked recreation and did not feel akeen for musical studies. The flexibility and instinctive agility of his fingers made him a pianist virtuoso enough to be called by his teachers to perform at the Conservatory. Let me add here to that of Goria that the so called "acquired reputation" did not in any way alter his gratitude towards the masters who had helped him so with advice and influence in his studies. He was an original spirit in spite of his apparent heaviness of humorous projections. Many of those who have imperfectly known him said he sounded pretentious and full of his own merit. This unfortunate appreciation is explained indeed by futile causes. Goria had neither the physiognomy of an Adonis nor the stretched features of the consumptive pianists. He was really at the opposite pole. His large size caused a natural reaction against the awkwardness of his cumbersome corpulence. A real shyness that he sought to disguise under an air of self-assurance whose exaggeration was just one more clumsiness.
Those magnificent éditeurs and their publishing "bis" edit
What surprised me most in this search for information about the dating of his compositions and his opus numbers, which were often changed for others in some editions, with or without an encore, and this was the way that publishers dealt with their composers and their compositions, which very often contained editorial or typographical errors. Short musical pieces were detached from their main body, split in diferent parts or even reunited under a single term like Nocturnes or Études. Eager to sell their product on sheets of paper at any price, the titles of Goria's compositions began to gain sugestive alternative titles and additions such as "dramatic", "characteristic", or "brilliant", all in the name of their business.
Several compositions caught my attention; one was Opus 19, another was 6, another was the sequence 7, 8, now 9 through another editor, 15, 16, 17, and 23. The same happened again in relation to other compositions. No. 3, Odessa, was detached from Opus 26 and that's how Opus 28 was created. Mistakes apart what we learn from all this seach among editors and music critics, envyness and debauchery, successful virtuoses and pseudo-composers, is that business comes first. What many people forget is that many of these composers, like Alexandre Goria, were just over their 20s when they were teaching piano at the Conservatory of Music in Paris with a bunch of songs published under their belt.
To be able to enter the life of a composer through his compositions and understand the events that generated those songs written almost 200 years ago is something gratifying to me. When we understand these events and what caused them, and their outcome, it's pretty much like reading a book or watching a film on television. Like this I began to understand where Goria was and what he was involved with along the path of his life.
Another opus number that called my attention was Goria's Op. 40. This is something very interesting because it reinforces the idea that Goria, as part of that Parisian musical scene in the mid-19th century, knew very well how to do marketing. Why to dedicate a song, who to look for help when marketing expertize was needed, besides of course the fruitful information he could get from very close friends like Gottschalk, Hermann, or Gonoud. Composers rushed to publish their fantasies about motifs from operas which were in vogue in those days, both because their publishers persuaded them to do it or because they had already convinced their clients that their composers were writing a new fantasy of this or that opera yet to premiere.
Goria used to ask for 200 Francs usually for two compositions whereas Moszkowski would cleverly react in a more business-like manner. Hence, many composers wrote didactically for music schools and conservatories or made transcriptions of compositions that were somehow in vogue at a given time. Goria knew how to take advantage of each of these artifices to sell in that artistic Paris of the first quarter of the 19th century. But that was almost 200 years ago. Back to this part of the world where access to digital libraries such as HathiTrust, Europeana, Gallica, and universities and museums such as the University of Cincinnati and the National Museum, Kraków is at the click of a mouse, it gets difficult to say that Hofmeister is still the most important source on the subject. Just another editorial nonsense, and one that doesn't sell at all.