Totengedenken und Wohltat. Ignaz Lachners Prolog zur Vorstellung zu Gunsten der Hinterbliebenen des weiland Kapellmeisters Albert Lortzing

Musical performances in the 19th century were often framed within a social and memorial context, which sits uneasy with notions of absolute music. Nonetheless, it remains beyond doubt that a significant share of public concerts and operatic performances served exactly such purposes. Orchestras and opera companies did regularly perform in order to raise money for their own pension funds or for other charitable causes. As events of this kind were normally held outside the subscription series and the musicians waived their fees, the gross income of ticket sales went directly to the beneficiaries, which may have been artefacts (such as the erection of a Beethoven monument in Bonn, to which Schumann contributed his Fantasie, op. 17) or human victims of natural disasters and hardships. Frequently the function of a charity concert was marked with a musical work explicitly written for the occasion. Innumerable references in programme listings document that such compositions must have existed in huge numbers, even though, due to their ephemeral status, they were normally not preserved for posterity. The resulting loss of source material has deprived us of an important aspect of 19th-century musical culture has fallen almost completely into oblivion. Among the orchestral materials of the Bavarian Court Opera, however, a rare instance of a benefit work has survived unnoticed: In 1851 Ignaz Lachner penned a melodramatic Prologue for the Benefit of the descendants of the late Kapellmeister Albert Lortzing, who had died earlier in the same year in bitter poverty, leaving behind a destitute widow and children. Albeit belatedly, the musical world was eager to pay a tribute to the foremost composers of German comic operas and organised many a fund-raising concert - including the Munich performance of opera Czaar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Carpenter). The paper uses Lachner's prologue as a case study to recover a little-known aspect of 19th-century music, which intertwines memorial and charitable functions