Wolfgang Joseph Lanz — frequently referred to in older sources by the Italianized form “Giuseppe Lanz” — was an Austrian composer, music theorist, violinist, and guitar teacher of the Biedermeier era. He was born on 20 January 1797 in Michaelnbach (Upper Austria) and died on 9 September 1873 in Vienna. Lanz received his first musical instruction from his father; his further musical training brought him into association, among other places, with St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, one of Austria’s most tradition-rich spiritual and musical centers. In September 1824, Lanz moved to Vienna, where he established himself permanently as a teacher of music and instruments and remained active thereafter.
Lanz within the Context of the Viennese Guitar Scene
Lanz’s move to Vienna coincided with a period in which the Austrian capital was regarded as the undisputed epicenter of the European guitar world — not least owing to the presence of towering virtuosos such as Mauro Giuliani, already discussed at length in earlier essays in this series. As a classically trained all-around musician of the Viennese School, active not only on the guitar but also as a violinist and music theorist, Lanz, in his capacity as guitar teacher and composer, made a valuable contribution to the flourishing culture of domestic, bourgeois music-making so characteristic of the Viennese Biedermeier period.
The 2 Rondinos for Solo Guitar, Op. 9
Although Lanz’s guitar output is modest in quantity, he bequeathed to posterity, with the “2 Rondinos for Solo Guitar,” Op. 9, a small but highly appealing legacy. The collection was published by the respected Viennese firm Sauer & Leidesdorf and is characterized — as the first of the two rondinos in particular exemplifies — by that typical, unmistakably charming Viennese Biedermeier style that also marked the guitar output of numerous contemporaries. The two individual pieces, composed in the form characteristic of the rondo genre, structured around a recurring refrain theme alternating with contrasting episodes, are of a manageable, intermediate level of technical difficulty — a quality that made them particularly well suited to the domestic music-making of the refined Viennese bourgeoisie, for whom this repertoire was originally intended.
In modern critical edition, the two rondinos — edited by Martin Rennert — are today available through Universal Edition as part of the series “Die Gitarre in der Klassik,” in which the Rondino, Op. 9, No. 1 (D major), and the Rondino, Op. 9, No. 2, have each appeared as independent volumes.
Significance
Joseph Lanz exemplifies that type of versatile Viennese music teacher of the Biedermeier era, active simultaneously in several instrumental fields, whose compositional output, though standing in the shadow of the great, canonized names such as Giuliani or Mertz, nonetheless offers valuable insight, through carefully crafted and stylistically convincing individual works, into the rich, multifaceted guitar culture of pre-1848 Vienna. The two Rondinos, Op. 9, thus stand as representative of that broad, still only partially explored repertoire of “second-tier” Viennese guitar composers, whose systematic rediscovery — as already seen with several of the peripheral figures discussed in this essay series — has only been made possible through the careful editorial work of recent decades.
