In the changing economic climate of the early nineteenth century, the German composer Andreas Romberg wrote a striking letter to his publisher (quoted in other chapters here):

What Romberg understands about the world—his world—is that the semblance of servitude, even to another composer, serves a promotional purpose. Romberg, writing in 1801, lays bare the falseness of the modesty inherent in dedications; rather than ask Simrock that his works receive a modicum of attention, he baldly proclaims that a public reference to Haydn will be profitable. The tone is all the more striking because it is so much the opposite of typical dedicatory language (demonstrated in chapter 1). Nearly thirty years later, Friedrich Kuhlau similarly asked the publisher Peters, in Leipzig, to include a dedication to “his friend,” the organist and teacher Albert Gottlieb Methfessel, because he claimed it would improve sales. We can assume that Simrock and Peters agreed with these composers’ bold predictions because they did print the dedications as requested—and we can also assume that many publishers in this period thought similarly of dedications, as they maintained the early modern practice of highlighting dedicatees typographically on the title page, evident through the 1840s when Felix Mendelssohn published his string quartets opus 44 (figure 2.1).