Career
In 1803 Diabelli moved to Vienna and began teaching piano and guitar and found work as a proofreader for a music publisher. During this period he learned the music publishing business while continuing to compose. In 1809 he composed his comic opera, Adam in der Klemme. In 1817 he started a music publishing business and 1818, partnered with Pietro Cappi to create the music publishing firm of Cappi & Diabelli.
The firm, Cappi & Diabelli became well known by arranging popular pieces so they could be played by amateurs at home. A master of promotion, Diabelli selected widely-accessible music such as famous opera tune arrangements, dance music, or hundreds of the latest popular comic theater songs
The firm soon established a reputation in more serious music circles by championing the works of Franz Schubert. It was Diabelli who first recognized the composer's potential, become the very first to publish Schubert's work with Der Erlkönig in 1821. Diabelli's firm continued to publish Schubert's work until 1823 when an argument between Cappi and Schubert terminated their business. The following year, Diabelli and Cappi parted ways, with Diabelli launching a new publishing house, Diabelli & Co, in 1824.
Following Schubert's early death in 1828, Diabelli purchased a large portion of the composer's massive musical estate from Schubert's brother Ferdinand. As Schubert's total compositions number nearly 1000, Diabelli's firm was able to publish "new" Schubert works for more than 30 years after the composer's death.
Diabelli's publishing house expanded throughout his life, before he retired in 1851, leaving it under the control of Carl Anton Spina. When Diabelli died in 1858, Spina continued to run the firm, and published much music by Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss. In 1872, the firm was taken over by Friedrich Schreiber, and in 1876 it merged with the firm of August Cranz, who bought the company in 1879 and ran it under his name.
He died in Vienna at the age of 76.
Read more about this topic: Anton Diabelli
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)