No verified biographical data survive concerning the figure of Joseph Charles Lom (also given as Jos. Charles Lom) — neither year of birth nor of death is documented. The relevant scholarship on the early Romantic guitar, such as Richard Long’s reference listing “Guitar Composers of the Classical and Early Romantic Period,” lists Lom among composers of unknown dates (“179?-18??”) and places him chronologically alongside Luigi Legnani (b. 1790), Matteo Carcassi (b. 1792), and Francesco Calegari — composers, that is, who began their careers in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century and reached their principal creative period during the 1820s to 1840s.
Only Lom’s published output allows for a more precise contextualization. His surviving compositions — among them the “6 Monferines” (Op. 3), the “Rondo brillant” (Op. 17), and the “Hommage à Panonie: Divertissement Hongrois pour la Guitare” (Op. 14, in A major, dedicated to Catherine Bach) — all appeared with the Viennese publishing house Diabelli, the same firm through which Giuliani, Wanczura, and numerous other Viennese guitar composers of the period issued their work. This suggests, though it cannot be established with absolute certainty, that Lom was active within the Viennese guitar culture of the 1820s and 1830s, like so many guitar composers of his generation. The transmission of these works via the Boije collection (today held at the Statens musikbibliotek, Stockholm) further confirms the pattern, typical of this era, whereby such compositions were preserved through the Scandinavian collecting circles that today account for a substantial portion of the known early Romantic guitar repertoire.
Of particular interest is the “Hommage à Panonie.” Its title — an homage to “Pannonia,” that is, historical Hungary — situates the work within the fashion for the style hongrois characteristic of guitar music of the 1820s through 1840s: that Romantic appropriation of Hungarian-Romani sonic characteristics (syncopated rhythms, augmented-second intervals, verbunkos-style alternation of slow and fast sections) also found in other guitar composers of the period — for instance in Legnani’s “Melodies National Hongroises” (Op. 203), with which Lom’s piece is noted in the specialist literature to share thematic material, or later in Johann Kaspar Mertz’s “Ungarische Fantasie.” Lom thus emerges as one of several Viennese guitar composers who put this popular exoticizing idiom to productive use on the instrument.
Lom’s other known works — the “6 Monferines” (a dance type originating in Piedmont, in 6/8 time and closely related to the furlana) and the “Rondo brillant” — by contrast show him in the more conventional dual role of the early Romantic guitar composer: on one hand adapting fashionable dance forms for the domestic repertoire, on the other producing more virtuosic, concert-oriented single movements, as embodied by the effect-oriented formal type of the “brillant” rondo.
Overall, Lom may be described as a typical representative of that second tier of Viennese guitar composers who, working in the shadow of the major figures — Giuliani, Legnani, and later Mertz — supplied a solid, marketable body of work for the publisher Diabelli, even as their individual biographies can no longer be reconstructed today. His output is of interest chiefly as evidence of the reception history of the style hongrois in guitar music and of Viennese publishing practice during the Biedermeier era.
