An Amateur’s Archive and Its Place in Guitar Historiography

Introduction

Among the source collections that underpin modern scholarship on the nineteenth-century guitar, few occupy a position as central — or as paradoxical — as the Boije Collection, housed today at the Music and Theatre Library of Sweden (Musik- och teaterbiblioteket, part of Musikverket) in Stockholm. Assembled not by a professional musician or institutional archivist but by an insurance clerk with a private passion for the instrument, the collection has become one of the indispensable repositories for the study of early Romantic guitar repertoire, rivaled in scope and significance chiefly by the Rischel & Birket-Smith Collection in Copenhagen. Its history illuminates not only the biography of a singular collector but also the broader phenomenon of private connoisseurship that preserved, almost by accident, a substantial portion of what is now understood as the guitar’s “golden age.”

The Collector: Carl Oscar Boije af Gennäs

Carl Oscar Boije af Gennäs was born on 7 July 1849 in Hasslövs socken, in Halland County, Sweden, and died on 24 December 1923. He descended from the Swedish-Finnish noble family Boije af Gennäs and worked professionally as a clerk at the Victoria life insurance company in Stockholm. He was, in other words, a man of the educated bourgeois-noble milieu typical of late nineteenth-century Stockholm — a background that afforded him both the disposable income and the cultural orientation necessary to sustain a decades-long collecting practice.

Boije af Gennäs was not merely a passive accumulator of scores; he was also an amateur guitarist and composer in his own right, having written a Marcia Funebre in memory of Otto Hammerer, published in 1905 in the journal of the Freie Vereinigung zur Förderung guter Guitarmusik, a society based in Augsburg devoted to the promotion of quality guitar music. This detail situates him within the international network of amateur guitar societies — German, Austrian, and Scandinavian — that sustained the instrument’s practice during a period in which it had largely receded from concert life and public prestige, surviving instead in salons, domestic music-making, and specialist periodicals such as the Gitarristische Vereinigung and the Freie Vereinigung, both of which are themselves richly represented within his collection.

Formation and Scope of the Collection

Over the course of his collecting activity, Boije af Gennäs assembled nearly 1,000 works, including printed editions by Dionisio Aguado, Matteo Carcassi, Ferdinando Carulli, Mauro Giuliani, Luigi Rinaldo Legnani, and Fernando Sor — effectively a roster of the central figures of the early Romantic guitar school. The collection is not limited to printed editions, however; it also includes hand-written examples from the nineteenth century, which considerably increases its value for source-critical work, since manuscript material can preserve readings, ornamentation, or performance indications absent from published editions.

The single most significant manuscript holding within the collection is the group of autographs by Johann Kaspar Mertz. The collection contains autographs of the Austrian composer, which Mertz’s widow sold to Boije af Gennäs following the composer’s death. This acquisition is of particular historiographical weight: Mertz, working in Vienna in the mid-nineteenth century, represents one of the last major voices of the guitar’s early Romantic tradition before its eclipse by the piano and, later, by the emergent nationalist schools associated with Tárrega and his successors. Manuscript sources acquired directly from a composer’s estate — rather than through the mediated channel of a publisher — carry a distinct evidentiary authority, and their presence in a private Swedish collection, far from Vienna, is itself a small case study in how musical material circulated and was preserved outside the institutional channels of its origin.

Donation and Institutional Custody

Boije af Gennäs did not retain his collection for private posterity alone. Following his death, the collection passed in 1924 as a bequest to the Statens Musikbibliotek — then known as the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademiens Bibliotek — in Stockholm. This transfer from private hands to a national institutional library is characteristic of a broader pattern in the preservation of specialist musical repertoires: material that might otherwise have been dispersed at auction, or simply lost through the indifference of heirs, was instead consolidated under professional archival care. The library’s continued custodianship — it now operates as part of Musikverket, the umbrella authority for Swedish music heritage — has ensured both the physical conservation of the material and, more recently, its scholarly and public accessibility.

Digitization and Modern Accessibility

The collection’s transition into the digital era occurred in the 2000s. The collection, which contains exclusively guitar music, was digitised in 2007, with the sheet music made available for free download in PDF format. Works from the collection may be published without special permission, on condition that the source — the Statens musikbibliotek, the Music Library of Sweden — is clearly acknowledged, with the library requesting two complimentary copies of any resulting publication. The catalogue itself is organized alphabetically by composer, with digitized facsimiles linked directly to individual entries, allowing researchers and performers alike to consult, for instance, the successive volumes of Giuliani’s later opus numbers — works such as the Op. 144–150 variation sets and potpourris that circulated widely in salon practice — without recourse to the original physical volumes.

This liberal access policy has had a disproportionately large effect on practical guitar scholarship and performance practice relative to the collection’s modest physical size. Because so much of the early nineteenth-century guitar repertoire survives only in scattered first editions, often in single exemplars, the Boije Collection’s open digital facsimiles have functioned as a de facto critical edition source for performers and musicologists working outside major research libraries — a role comparable to that played by IMSLP for the broader instrumental repertoire, though with the added authority of a single, coherently provenanced collection rather than a crowdsourced aggregation.

Historiographical Significance

The scholarly value of the Boije Collection extends beyond its role as a repository of otherwise-inaccessible prints. As an assemblage formed by a single amateur collector working within an identifiable network — the German and Austrian guitar societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the collection also functions as an artifact of reception history. Its contents document not merely what guitar composers wrote, but what a discerning, well-connected amateur of the Gitarristische Vereinigung milieu considered worth preserving: a canon-in-formation that privileged the Viennese and Italian virtuoso tradition (Giuliani, Legnani, Mertz) alongside the Franco-Iberian strand represented by Sor, Aguado, and Carulli, while also registering the specifically Nordic afterlife of guitar practice through Boije af Gennäs’s own compositional contributions and his engagement with contemporary Scandinavian and German-language guitar periodicals.

In this respect, the collection invites comparison with contemporaneous Scandinavian musical culture more broadly — including figures such as Carl Fredrik Ullman, whose activity in Sweden occupies an adjacent, if distinct, sphere of nineteenth-century salon and pedagogical music-making. The Boije Collection thus stands not only as a guitar-specific archive but as a document of how a peripheral, non-metropolitan collector could, through sustained private initiative, preserve a transnational repertoire that institutional collecting practices of the period might otherwise have neglected.

Conclusion

The Boije Collection exemplifies a pattern recurrent in the history of musical source preservation: the decisive intervention of the informed amateur. Carl Oscar Boije af Gennäs was neither a professional musician nor a trained archivist, yet his sustained, decades-long engagement with the guitar’s international amateur culture resulted in an assemblage of printed and manuscript material that, upon its 1924 donation and 2007 digitization, became a cornerstone resource for the study of the nineteenth-century guitar. Its combination of breadth (printed editions spanning the principal composers of the early Romantic guitar school), depth (the Mertz autographs), and, not least, open accessibility, secures its place as one of the essential archives for musicological and performance-practice research into an instrument whose nineteenth-century history remains, in many respects, still being written.

Unknown Composers for the guitar:

The Boije Collection is a great treasure trove of relatively unknown Classical and Romantic guitar composers. Below you will find a list of them, along with the works I have transcribed into tablature.