Introduction
Bibliography is the art of the impossible. It was ever so, although the impossibility
was not always recognized. The early compilers of lists of books—practitioners of
what we came to call enumerative bibliography—hardly sensed the intractability
of their projects. They worked alone. They wanted to find and report everything.
Indeed, there used to be an ideal of “universal bibliography,” a master list of all
that had been written—an exotic mirage, not mentioned after around 1800.
We who work in music bibliography have shared in the grand illusion that we
could make complete lists of scores or writings and do it single-handedly. Valiant
efforts, lifetime toils, of Robert Eitner, Carl Becker, and Emil Vogel—mileposts of
bibliographic history—are superseded by more inclusive (still incomplete) inven-
tories created by teams and projects. The last warrior to face the challenge of
totality in music bibliography was Franz Pazdirek, whose 14-volume Universal-
Handbuch der Musikliteratur aller Zeiten und Volker(1904–1910) resonates, in
title and scope, with the bluster of romanticism. Pazdirek identified a half million
musical compositions, but they were not really from “all times” (it was an in-
print list heavy with recent publications) or “all peoples” (it was primarily about
Europe and the United States).
During the 20th century, we music bibliographers have picked smaller tar-
gets. Going from more to less requires selectivity, which demands criteria for
choosing and rejecting. Nobody will compile a list of all the music written in the
century, or all the books about music, and certainly not all the periodical articles.
Instead, there are selective inventories of restricted patches, such as a list of criti-
cal writings about the Vienna performances of Die Frau ohne Schatten,or—a big-
ger patch—writings about Zoltán Kodály. Along with selectivity has come the
useful practice of content description, at times offering critiques and compar-
isons. This mode seems more manageable than the earlier all-inclusive one, but it
also remains impossible. There is far too much music and too much written about
it, for anyone to discover. We tend to select from a selection made by others
(librarians, other list-compilers), to skip troublesome languages, to step away
xv