Potpourri composers? and related Library of Congress-ish things

[eschiss1]

Not sure if this is a name that is fair to them or does them justice at all, as I find more and more that - unsurprisingly, in retrospect - the best of the composers who concentrated on potpourris etc. and seem to have never tackled other forms and genres (well, hardly ever?) are much better composers than I thought, and are engaging my interest more than I thought. (I used to focus a lot more on the - well, usually called larger forms even when they seem to show up in Webern...)

This 2-bit epiphany (thanks, Peter Schickele, for the lovely phrase) courtesy of the substantial look-overs etc. I've done of a number of scores by Sydney Smith, Charles Grobe and a number of others, some slightly better-known than others, for IMSLP.  I'm torn between asking about similar 2-bit epiphanies (small revelations) and sticking to topic, one's feelings about the best of the multitude of minor 19th-century composers whose works filled the published and unpublished sheet music ranks. (The best part including of course much Liszt before Weimar- a subject line I considered including.

The works by these composers - many found scanned in at memory.loc.gov - are generally more or less limited to, i find, marches, dances, potpourris on then well-known operas, variation sets, songs, methods of instruction, arrangements of works by others (which gives interesting sidelights, as the potpourris do, on who was well-known in the US and who wasn't in the time the LOC / Duke university project covers ,more or less music published by American publishing houses between 1820 and 1885 or so?... - a point that interests me as an amateur untrained would-be music historian ), songs, and many liturgical works. That said, the quality and even diversity of some of these works within the formal limits varies and some seems reasonably good to me - though I and others reupload rather a bit to imslp (not just the I think it's good stuff admittedly, for various reasons- preservation/spreading things so they're not just in one place in case no one downloads it from loc, after 'cleaning' their copy a little ) . anyhow. _There_ I babble. 

(And am left with more questions. Charles Wels- interesting stuff there by him, and arrangements by him too. Wait, some earlier scores by "Charles Welsch"? Is that someone else or was that his birthname which he later shortened? No one mentions that online- Wikipedia, other places- but how much do we know about him? Just for example. Indeed, trying to fill out the biographical details of these composers has been a challenge and a half- and I say that often with a smile, not a groan of a frown...)

To bring *yank!!!! no pun intended by this Yankee* back to topic, while my aural experience (as opposed to visual) with the music of these lighter-piano-music composers is less, though quite a bit has been recorded by them by now.  Still, anyone want to chime in about relative quality of, say, Baumfelder (Friedrich, not Fritz - if any of Fritz Baumfelder's music even survives, that is - and yes, I know Baumfelder wrote several piano trios, sonatas, symphonies, etc. though they seem mostly to have been lost, but in a sense that strictly may disqualify him from this category )... , Grobe, Sydney Smith, Arnoldo Sartorio, Carl Faust, Brinley Richards, Küffner (yes, wrote some 6 or 7 symphonies and several concertos apparently though later in his career settled down to writing potpourri and variation after etc.- or so it seems), Rudolf Bial, etc.?

(I am not saying that there is only music of this kind - speaking somewhat broadly and indistinctly - in the LoC scan collection ; there is at least a small collection of scanned-in violin , organ, piano (and other - cello, I think- sonatas also) sonatas, for instance. The violin sonata at LoC (and which I did have to upload to IMSLP - Matzka violin sonata in G, copyright 1876) I was interested by most recently was by a Georg(e) Matzka , who also left a symphony, concert overture, songs, other violin music, etc. ...
Eric