Giulio Ricordi

Giulio Ricordi was an Italian editor and musician who joined the family firm, the Casa Ricordi music publishing house, in 1863, then run by his father, Tito, the son of the company’s founder Giovanni Ricordi. Upon his father’s death in 1888, Giulio became the head of the company until his death.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Giulio Ricordi.

From the period sources

Giulio Ricordi, the Milan music-publisher, was known to his contemporaries not only as the head of the renowned firm but also as a creative artist in his own right. Born in 1840, he was the son of Tito Ricordi, who had further expanded the business founded by Giovanni Ricordi, a publisher who made his initial success with Mosca’s Pretendenti delusi and whose firm became known for publishing the original scores of many great Italian maestri, including Verdi and Boito, according to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1922). Giulio himself was a “practised writer, a skilled draughtsman,” and a composer of drawing-room music, publishing under the pseudonym “J. Burgmein,” as noted in A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900) and Grove’s Dictionary (1922). This latter source describes him as “in all respects a thoroughly cultivated man,” reflecting his diverse talents beyond the publishing empire that, by 1875, boasted a catalogue of 738 large octavo pages. The Ricordi firm’s influence extended widely, publishing works for figures such as the distinguished pianist Giuseppe Buonamici and the famous singing teacher Francesco Lamperti, whose vocal method and études were issued by Ricordi, as recorded in A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900, 1905) and Dictionary of Music (1896, 1908).