This guide is part of our overview of the essential classical guitar repertoire. Johann Kaspar Mertz (1806–1856) was the most important guitar composer of the mid-nineteenth century — a Slovak-born, Vienna-based musician who absorbed the Romantic piano idiom of Chopin, Schumann, and Schubert and translated it into a body of guitar music of unprecedented richness and ambition.
Bardenklänge and the Romantic Guitar
Born in Bratislava, Mertz moved to Vienna and built a career as a guitarist and teacher while his wife Josephine Plantin — an accomplished pianist — filled their home with Romantic piano music. Nearly dying from strychnine poisoning in 1846 (possibly from a medical treatment overdose), Mertz recovered and, during those months of listening to his wife play, absorbed the harmonic world of the Romantic piano masters. The result was the Bardenklänge (Bardic Sounds), Op. 13, published by Tobias Haslinger in Vienna from 1847 — fifteen volumes of guitar pieces that brought genuinely Romantic compositional ambitions to an instrument the mainstream had largely abandoned.
His Tarantella, Fantaisie Hongroise (Op. 65, No. 1), and Elegie have all entered the permanent concert repertoire. The Fantaisie Hongroise draws on the Hungarian style hongrois — with its slow lassú opening and fast friss finale — placing Mertz in the same cultural tradition as Liszt and Brahms.
