Leonhard Schulz (1814–1860) was a Vienna-born guitar virtuoso who attracted attention as an exceptionally precocious child, giving his first public concert at the age of only eight. Together with his brother Eduard, also a musician, he formed a sibling duo that toured Europe during the 1820s to considerable acclaim. In his youth, Schulz was taken by the eminent pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles to Dublin, where the two performed concerts together — a connection that is likely of direct biographical significance for his later work devoted to Irish music.
At the beginning of 1828, the Schulz family gave a series of concerts in Paris that attracted the attention of the influential critic François-Joseph Fétis. Notably, the first of these concerts took place on 21 January — just one day after a concert given by Fernando Sor. Both events had in fact been organized by rival piano manufacturers seeking to showcase their instruments: Sor performed in a concert arranged by Dietz, while the Schulz siblings appeared in one organized by Pape. While Sor’s performance is chiefly remembered today for Fétis’s critical remark regarding his tone production, the contemporary press reported considerably more extensively on the Schulz siblings’ concert — an indication of the substantial impression Leonhard Schulz in particular made as a guitarist in Paris. Following a further tour of England, Schulz settled permanently in London in 1828, where he was thereafter regarded as one of the most brilliant guitar performers of his generation.
Regarding the correct form of his name, scholarship is not entirely unanimous: while the overwhelming majority of contemporary sources, concert reviews, publishers’ catalogues, and reference works — with the exception of the Spanish-language Diccionario by Domingo Prat, who calls him “Leonardo” (a common Italianization or Hispanicization of Christian names in the Spanish- and Italian-language literature of the time) — consistently use the name “Leonhard Schulz,” this spelling has occasionally been called into question in more recent scholarship.
Recollections of Ireland, Op. 41
The Recollections of Ireland, Op. 41, is a fantasy on Irish folk melodies and thus belongs to a genre highly popular in the early nineteenth century: the “grand fantasia,” or potpourri, on national — and particularly Irish — airs, composed at the time by numerous composers for a wide variety of instrumental forces. Notably, Schulz’s companion and mentor Ignaz Moscheles wrote a piano work of nearly identical title — The Recollections of Ireland, Op. 69, a “grand fantasia” on the airs “The Groves of Blarney,” “Garry Owen,” and “St. Patrick’s Day,” with orchestral accompaniment — which, given the two musicians’ shared experience of performing together in Dublin, can hardly be coincidental, and suggests that Schulz’s guitar work was directly inspired by this shared musical and biographical context.
The transmission of Schulz’s composition is not without its complications: the modern edition available today (edited by Matanya Ophee, Editions Orphée) is based on a non-autograph manuscript copy held in the Rischel/Birket-Smith collection at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, made by the Danish guitarist J. G. Holm — the same dedicatee of two works by Napoléon Coste, whose numerous surviving copies, when compared against printed original editions (including those of Carulli, Coste, Mertz, Sor, and Tárrega), have consistently proven reliable and accurate. Since, however, neither an autograph nor a confirmed first edition of Op. 41 is known to survive, it cannot be established with final certainty to what extent the transmitted copy corresponds to the version originally played, or indeed composed, by Schulz himself.
Significance
The Recollections of Ireland, Op. 41, exemplifies a widespread practice of the early nineteenth century: the transformation of popular national melodies — here, Irish airs — into virtuosic instrumental fantasias intended for both the concert stage and domestic music-making. For the guitar literature, the work is also an interesting example of how closely the guitar virtuosos of the period were connected to the broader international concert world — here through Schulz’s personal association with Moscheles — and of how musical themes and subjects circulated freely across instrumental boundaries. Despite the unresolved state of its transmission, the work remains a valuable testament to Schulz’s compositional output and adds a guitaristic facet to the broader picture of the Irish national musical idiom within the nineteenth-century international concert repertoire.
