The zeal for a new, secular, scientific truth which emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century in a post-revolutionary, post-Enlightenment world sought to emancipate itself from an epistemological past where, as William Lubenow has suggested:
the subject of knowledge was dogma. Early modern knowledge was often tied to confessional tests and state-building. One road to modernity could be read as escape from institutional and confessional restraints to the freedom of reason. A second one could be read as escape to networks of association and belonging.
(Lubenow 2015, back cover)
In relation to these networks, the formation of societies, some formal, some less so, shaped a new culture of shared learning and mutual ideals. It was an era in which the state and nation looked to participate in their endorsement of knowledge, education, and self-improvement as agencies of progressiveness. Knowledge formed part of a larger matrix of power, yet in an age of state authority, there was a need for intellectual liberty as part of a newly emerging democratic world; the influence of societies—not least those that were not state organized—could act as vital counteractions to the discourses of the day. Science, of course, led the way, but music, along with many other disciplines, could not escape the magnetism, energy, and momentum that societies and institutions abundantly exuded and that often formed the focus of higher, nobler aims.
Some of the earliest evidence of music and the concept of the “learned society” can be witnessed in the foundation of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, instigated in Rome by the papal bull Ratione congruit of 1585 by Sixtus V. Conceived as a “confraternity,” its early mission was to form a conduit for local musicians and composers. However, in a search for status and social position, it soon began to identify music as a profession and craft which required recognition not only from its practitioners but also from its employers and patrons, and, in time, from the wider public; moreover, in order to reinforce the standing of those who practiced music, education and training soon became an important focus, as did the ideas of trade, discipline, conditions of work, and “official” musical publications. Inevitably, as the role and reputation of the Accademia Nazionale expanded, so did the need for a collective imprimatur which became a significant gesture of authority. Indeed, as this sense of collectivity evolved over time, so its members required the endorsement of the Accademia to practice their profession in Rome.1 The role of the pontiff in the operation of the Accademia resembled the role played by monarchs or other plenipotentiaries who endorsed the musical guilds since the Middle Ages in many parts of Europe, notably France, Germany, and Britain. Most guilds enjoyed similar privileges and exercised similar powers. The emphasis on education took the form of protracted apprenticeships—rites of passage which ensured a strong ethos of protectionism in terms of access to knowledge, employment, and trade. With the shift toward entrepreneurism and nongovernmental interference in trade, however, the restrictive practices of the guilds were seen as a dead weight in terms of mercantile progress, free competition, and economic prosperity, and they were the target of criticism in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776, 1:154).
It was during the seventeenth century, as an underlying symptom of the embryonic Enlightenment, that a more universal zeal was shown for the formation of the “learned society,” as can be seen in France with the Académie française, Académie des sciences, Académie des Beaux Arts, Académie de peinture et de sculpture, Académie de musique and Académie d’architecture; in England with the Royal Society; in Germany with the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina; and in Italy with the Accademia dei Lincei. Like the guilds, these institutions gained kudos from monarchical endorsement; more significantly, however, the centrality of these institutions, replete with royal charters, brought a new sense of cultural values to the sciences and the arts in which the state had a new part to play both politically and, in some cases, financially. The subject focus of the society gained added patronage and respect; methods of epistemological inquiry and scholastic recognition became a matter of national imperative; and the conduct of its members commanded a new, elevated esteem, both intellectually and socially.
After the French Revolution in 1789, the social status of France’s learned societies was subject to considerable political revision, while the guilds in France, seen as symbols of outmoded feudalism, were abolished by the Le Chapelier law of 1791. The newly formed First Republic ventured to reinvent, redefine, and reconstitute many of their original principles with the foundation of the Institut de France in September 1792, though it was not until the demise of Napoleon that many of the older academies ultimately emerged with their new post-Enlightenment agendas. At the very epicenter of the new French attitude to music, and one largely shaped by the precepts of Cicero, Rousseau, and Tocqueville (Pasler 2009, 69), was the idea of public utility, the centralized power of the state, and the notion of knowledge as power. In the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Revolution and its bid to export its ideals across Europe, this notion of utilité publique was taken up with an even greater urgency. Music, like many other aspects of life, had to fulfill a public need, as well as a public good, and if this could be proved, then there was the possibility of receiving public funding and political support from the state. In music’s case, there was always the question of fulfilling charitable aims such as education. To this end, the state actively supported the foundation of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1795 (formed through the combination of the École royale and the Institut national de musique); and besides its central purpose of training practitioners and composers, with an emphasis on instrumental music (which suited the state’s secular aspirations), it maintained a library and, later, a museum of instruments. These facets, particularly a passion for bibliophilia—would prove to be immensely influential. Overseeing the state policy for music was the Académie des Beaux Arts, which invited prominent composers to occupy influential seats (fauteuils) within Section V (“Composition musicale”) of the larger institution. In 1795, three seats were created for Nicholas Méhul, François Gossec, and André Grétry; a fourth was created in 1796 for Jean-Baptiste Grandménil, and after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, two more were granted to Louis Cherubini and Jean-François Le Sueur.
The act of placing the “elites” at the Academy initiated an important civic process. The primary factor was the public participation of the state in the institutionalization of composition and, later, musical scholarship. But there were other factors too, including the organization of concerts and special commemorations. All these elements, the state recognized, could contribute to a wider national infrastructure in which music was considered the equal of the other arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting. The Academy’s endorsement of musical education as a learned profession was also combined with the ambition that France could and should be the leading nation in terms of musical culture, performance, and education with a desire to look outward to the world. It was with this aspiration in mind that the Academy also instituted chairs for foreign members (“les Associés Étrangers”) in 1801—chairs which were subsequently offered to figures such as Joseph Haydn (elected in 1801), Antonio Salieri (1805), Giovanni Paisiello (1809), Gioachino Rossini (1823), Peter Cornelius (1838), Giuseppe Verdi (1864), and Johannes Brahms (1896) to honor their achievements but also their international standing. Furthermore, as part of this international outreach, the Academy des Beaux Arts looked to associate itself with the modern “cutting edge” in the support of composition. Initially for painters, sculptors, and architects, the Prix de Rome was extended to music in 1803 to enable French composers to spend time at the Villa Medici in Rome for four years entirely at the expense of the French government. This institution (which continued until its abolition in 1968) enabled young composers to establish their careers, and among those that benefited from this state largesse were Hector Berlioz (1830), Georges Bizet (1857), Jules Massenet (1863), Claude Debussy (1884), Gustave Charpentier (1887) and Florent Schmitt (1900). Although the general view prevails that state institutions like the Institut de France essentially exercised a conservative, indeed potentially stultifying influence on creative processes—one might argue that state participation and endorsement have an unavoidably conflicted role to play in the arts in general (as twentieth-century examples of fascism and communism have shown only too blatantly)—parts of its vision, certainly ab initio, were well meaning and progressive in intent, an evaluation which runs contrary to the norm.
The sense of prestige that established names brought to the “forward-looking” Academy, and to the French state, was obvious for all to see, but the influence of the Academy could be more than general in its exercise of power. After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815, Gossec and his colleague Bernard Sarrette (famous for the establishment of the revolutionary Garde nationale) were dismissed from the Conservatoire, and the instrumental bias at the institution gravitated more to the more traditional taste for opera (Locke 1990, 41), a political decision endorsed by Luigi Cherubini (who became director of the Conservatoire). For much of the nineteenth century the partiality for opera was reflected in the prizes administered by the Academy, notably the Prix Rossini (for a libretto) (Holoman 2004, 272–273), and the Prix Mombinne (for an opéra comique), though the Academy also lent its name to the award of the Prix Chartier for chamber music.
The Institut de France was very much at the vanguard of national sociétés savants, and to hold a chair carried the greatest sense of kudos and recognition, but from this umbrella organization many smaller, provincial institutions were spawned which replicated the same structures. Other European countries, many of which had fallen under the sway of Napoleon, also adopted similar models. In Germany, like those in France and England, the Gelehrte Gesellschaften were founded in the seventeenth century, such as the Königlich Preusserische Akademie der Künste in 1696; but after the example of France, numerous new societies were formed among the German states, such as the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in 1808 and the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig in 1846. Like the Académie des Beaux Arts, the distinguished elected members of the German Academies were responsible for organizing concerts, colloquia, the support of official editions and publications, the administration of state prizes, and the granting of special honors. In the nineteenth century, as a reflection of Prussia’s growing industrial and military power, the Königlich Preusserische Akademie der Künste (its title was established in 1809) became the most prominent and influential learned society for music (as well as for painters, architects, and authors) and specifically assigned a section to music in 1835; after German Unification in 1870, the institution became the Königlich Akademie der Künste until its reformation at the end of the First World War, electing by secret ballot prominent composers to hold the office of Vosteheramt der Meisterschule für Musik (including Felix Mendelssohn, Otto Nicolai, Woldemar Bargiel, Max Bruch, Heinrich von Herzogenberg, and Xaver Scharwenka), as well bestowing honors on foreign figures.2 Similarly, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which had maintained a narrow remit for much of its existence, broadened its outlook after the Napoleonic period. Composers remained a pillar of the organization, but musicology, organology, and music publishing were recognized, as were their practitioners, while librettists, poets, and dancers also gained recognition. In 1838, the official title of Academy was given to the institution which was supported by Cherubini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Paganini, and Rossini, and following the French paradigm, its doors were opened to honorary members such as Mendelssohn, Liszt, Auber, Gounod, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer, as well as heads of royal houses. After the foundation of the Italian state, the Accademia underwent considerable revision and duly emerged as a new symbol of international prestige. To reinforce the importance and status of the Accademia, which continued to number the best part of one hundred scholars as the mainstay of its raison d’être, its educational commitment was promoted from a “Liceo musicale” (essentially with high-school status) to a fully functioning conservatory; a new concert hall, the Sala Academica, was inaugurated in 1895 which, like the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, embraced concert-giving.
If the Accademia di Santa Cecilia became a potent institutional focus in Italy’s capital, then its equivalent, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, was the most significant musical learned society in Vienna, the epicenter of the Hapsburg Empire and, as Sigrid Wiesmann has described, the “bastion of conservatism” (Wiesmann 1990, 84–105). As Julius Reiber has suggested (n.d.), the Gesellschaft’s emergence in 1812 during the turbulent times of Austria’s protracted conflict with Napoleon represented a musical edification quite at odds with that of the French notion of utility, and after suffering such a cataclysmic defeat at Austerlitz in 1807, the defiant Austrians had turned back Napoleon at the Battle of Aspern in 1809. Constituting a very different audience from that made up of French revolutionary citizens, the alliance of the Viennese aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie looked to their musical heritage as a bulwark against French expansionism. As Wiesmann has remarked:
The nineteenth-century Austrian bourgeoisie was formed largely by a rapidly growing class of officials, products of the academic reforms of the later eighteenth century, who became the carriers of a bourgeois culture quite separate from that of the nobility, the clergy, the peasants, the labouring class and, indeed, the petty bourgeoisie. And it was mostly this relatively small minority that favoured what is usually referred to as art music. (Wiesmann 1990, 85)
It was from this burgeoning class of bourgeoisie that the Gesellschaft materialized. As a response to a highly successful concert overseen by a women’s charitable institution, the Noblewomen’s Society for the Advancement of Good and Benevolence (the Gesellschaft adeliger Frauen zur Beförderung des Guten und Nützlichen), which gave a performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast at the Imperial Winter Riding School (known today as the Spanish Riding School) in 1812, its enterprising secretary, Joseph Ferdinand Sonnleithner, inaugurated the Gesellschaft with 507 signatures. These founding members of the Gesellschaft staged two further epic performances of Handel’s oratorio on November 29 and December 3, 1813, as if to symbolize, in Alexander’s wrathful destruction of Persopolis, Vienna’s own vengeful rejoinder at Aspern to Napoleon’s European exportation of revolution and its artistic values. After receiving Imperial sanction in 1814,3 the Gesellschaft’s president and board of directors looked to consolidate the organization as a state magnet of musical celebration and edification. An important aim of the Gesellschaft, like that of the Institut de France and the Accademia Nazionale, was to sponsor concerts and to promote education. In 1817, the “Conservatorium” was founded, and from an initial four subscription concerts in the Redoutensaal and Riding School, the number expanded. The “learned” aspect of the Gesellschaft—its much-valued library—gained appreciable momentum in 1819 when the collection (numbering some 4,000 printed volumes) of the critic and famous lexicographer Ernest Ludwig Gerber (1746–1819) was purchased (Pohl 1913, 162), although its status as one of Europe’s greatest musical libraries was ultimately established with the inheritance in 1831 of the enormous private library of Archduke Rudolph, who had been a patron of the Gesellschaft since 1814.
Initially amateur in ethos, the Gesellschaft’s concerts were given by its members (which included Beethoven, who was made an honorary member in 1826, and Schubert, a member of the Board of Representatives, who dedicated his “Great” C major Symphony to the Gesellschaft) and this element of amateurism was maintained with the foundation of the “Singverein” in 1858. After the formation of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842, however, there was a mounting need for greater professional guidance and expertise within the sphere of orchestral music, and this began with the employment of a professional conductor in 1851; others such as Anton Rubinstein (1871), Brahms (1872–75) and Hans Richter (1884–90) followed. Likewise, the scholarly ambience of the library, already in possession not only of printed volumes but also of a burgeoning collection of autograph manuscripts by Gluck, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (including many sketches), and Schubert, was enhanced by the appointment of Carl Ferdinand Pohl (1819–1887) in January 1866. Already an established international scholar of Haydn and Mozart,4 Pohl produced the first history of the Gesellschaft in 1871 (Pohl 1871a) and was central in strengthening the sense of an Austro-German musical canon with his Denkschrift aus Anlass des hundertjährigen Bestehens der Tonkünstler Societät … in Wien (Pohl 1871b). Pohl’s standing as a musicologist and his association with the Gesellschaft also helped to reinforce its relationship with scholarship and scholarly publications, one later emphasized by Pohl’s successor, Eusebius Mandyczewski (1857–1929), responsible for editions of Haydn, Schubert, and Brahms (whose estate was appropriated by the Gesellschaft in 1897) and the scholarship of Martin Gustav Nottebohm (1817–1882).
The role of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was seminal to the shaping of musical taste, performance, and scholarship in nineteenth-century Austria, but its ethos of Teutonic Kultur, closely associated with the glories of the Hapsburg Empire (projected by its architectural design commensurate with the new Ringstrasse’s pseudo-Classical style) (Banks 1991, 87), and its close links with the connoisseur, an elevated social status, a nostalgia for its eighteenth-century heritage (95), and a yearning for the “inner” spiritual values were those which critics such as Franz Brendel (1811–1868) attempted to recover in his Leipzig University lectures of 1850 (Bent 1994, 21). These underlined a very different political and cultural raison d’être from those forces which inaugurated the state-centered utilité publique of France. What is more, this fundamental difference was destined to widen with the authoritarianism of Klemens von Metternich’s censorious regime and anti-liberal policies, which allowed the abstract practice of instrumental music (essentially wordless and therefore free from suspicion) to thrive at the expense of other genres.
It is perhaps an indication of the changing, politically turbulent times in Europe during the first two decades of the nineteenth century that, while the Académie des Beaux Arts, the Königlich Preusserische Akademie der Künste, and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde were all being concurrently established, one of Britain’s oldest and most venerable musical institutions, the Philharmonic Society, was also founded in 1813. As Leanne Langley has shown, the Society’s foundation came about through an interesting confluence of events occasioned by John Nash’s development of the Marylebone Estate (what we now know as Regent’s Park and Regent Street), the joint efforts of former musical rivals, and the interests of George IV and the Crown Estate (Langley 2013, 3 and 14 passim).5 What is clear is that, while the performance element of the music was a high priority, this artistic venture was also influenced by a clear commercial focus on self-governance and financial viability—typical of the entrepreneurial spirit of London’s concert music in the late eighteenth century. In the same way as its continental counterparts, the Society developed its international profile by the granting of honorary membership, the husbandry of a library, and from 1871, the awarding of a gold medal in recognition of musical achievement. It was an organization with ideals, but was shaped by a different history and by different expectations.6
After the formation of these larger organizations, supported either officially or unofficially by the state, the importance of professional coherence and solidarity became increasingly important to musicians, not least with the foundation of educational institutions which required professional verification and legitimacy. In Austria, some sense of unity had already been engendered by the Tonkünstler-Societät (founded in 1771), although the principal aim of this body was to support retired musicians, their widows, and their families. It drew strong support from the aristocracy at its inception, largely because of patronage, but even after the conditions of patronage changed during the nineteenth century, the Society continued to exist and carry out its charitable work. A similar organization existed in Britain: the Royal Society of Musicians, founded in 1738 (as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”), which still functions to aid those in the profession with illness or impecuniousness in old age. A sense of professional solidarity was also expressed, in many ways reviving the spirit of the old guilds, in the need to protect the rights of composers. This was enacted in France in 1829 as the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques to protect the copyrights of composers and writers and as an instrument to lobby government when copyright laws are challenged. Britain followed suit in 1884 with its Society of Authors (which also included composers), though it eventually embraced a more “learned” dimension with its awarding of bursaries, traveling scholarships, translation awards, and prizes to up-and-coming, as well as distinguished, individuals. A further revival of the guilds in Britain was reflected in the resurgence of interest in the Worshipful Company of Musicians which, having lost its identity during the eighteenth century, sought to reinvent itself as a philanthropic agency in 1870 under its newly elected Master, William Chappell (1809–1888). Through the awards of medals, prizes, and scholarships, and with pre-eminent musicians as its Masters, it retains a strong dedication to the promotion of musical education. Also significant was the creation in 1882 of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), which sought to have the nation’s most pre-eminent musicians as either members or part of the executive. Moreover, its aims were to embrace musicians from the widest backgrounds, reflecting the considerable expansion, proliferation, and diversification of the profession during the nineteenth century.
Societies clearly existed, and indeed proliferated, for the welfare, support, and validation of the music profession; they were also a powerful agency for shared artistic aims. In an age of national and national self-awareness, the society was also harnessed as a means of projecting a manifesto of identity. In post-revolutionary France, the question of identity was linked with virtually all foundations and societies by dint of political change, and as has been suggested earlier, the reaction to Napoleonic expansion had itself also spawned institutions with a sense of national character and aspiration. In Britain, however, a lack of recognition for native composers gave rise to the Society for British Musicians in 1834 which, as Simon McVeigh has remarked, represented “a long-awaited response to journalistic taunts of British ineffectuality” and a “bold, even foolhardy, stand against the musical establishment, and especially against the Philharmonic Society, widely perceived as unsympathetic to the claims and aspirations of the rising new British School” (McVeigh 2000, 149). In an age when reform, disenfranchisement, and exclusion were common parts of the political agenda (154), the Society for British Musicians represented a rare example of the musical profession’s outright protest and opposition to the policies of the Philharmonic. Furthermore, with a healthy recruitment of up to 350 members, the fostering of a private library (which enhanced its status as a learned society), and figures such as George Macfarren (1813–1887) and William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) at the vanguard of the cause, the Society was highly successful in its first flush of concert-giving and in the reception it gained from the press. Yet with time, a range of failures began to undermine the Society’s raison d’être. There was no patronage from royalty, influence from senior indigenous musicians was patchy at best, and there was general dissatisfaction with the pro-British agenda that the Society projected (160–161). Accusations of poor management, a lack of proper scrutiny of members (which compared markedly with the more restricted nature of France’s Société des Compositeurs de Musique) (162), petty jealousies, and internal factions (common failings in so many societies and associations) served to destabilize its social and artistic capital, and though it attempted to reshape itself on at least two occasions, it finally withered in 1865.
Membership and participation in societies and institutions provided a stamp of social approval—some undoubtedly wore their involvement like a badge of honor—in which the gentlemanly status of education, especially university education, was a recognized rite of passage. Membership was, in theory, open to all, even though in reality this was not the outcome. A financial contribution—a subscription—was almost always the accepted norm (it remains unchanged for the most part today) for those who were nominated for honorary association. It was a factor which commonly excluded those below the upper-middle classes, but membership often depended on the larger collective view, on sponsors, seconders, and elections, and to be “blackballed” was a noted social stigma. We should also not ignore the possibility that, in seeking like-minded social structures, those who participated also potentially sought to exclude those whom they opposed, and such structures could be the breeding ground for damaging prejudices, snobberies, and envy (Lubenow 2015, 13, 15). Women were invariably excluded from learned societies, institutions, and clubs for much of the nineteenth century, but by the closing decades, with admittance of women to university degrees, the creation of women’s colleges, and, concomitantly, the establishment of clubs (such as the University Women’s Club of 1883), and the fact that women were, little by little, entering professional and academic life, numerous professional bodies began to extend invitations to female members and associates. Musical institutions also demanded female singing teachers; Jenny Lind, on her retirement from singing, became a voice professor at the Royal College of Music when it opened its doors in 1883. Notwithstanding the pecuniary aspect, the range and character of members, who might emanate from baronets, knights of the realm, elevated tradesmen, successful businessmen, and well-to-do commoners, varied immensely. As Lubenow has intimated, they could be “hommes de lettres, savants, érudits, philosophes, bel esprits, the curious, the professionals, the connoisseurs, specialists, experts, virtuosi” or “intellectuals.” But in general, the membership was hard to classify except to say that the members could not simply be defined by wealth or elevated birth. For the most a common thread was the advantage of the written word, the critical mind, and a cosmopolitan outlook which transcended national borders. Indeed, “neither partisan nor populist, these societies and their members were attached to public life and their knowledge had the effect of enlarging civil society” (11, 27).
By comparison, the inauguration of the Société Nationale de Musique, a movement which emerged from l’année terrible of 1870 and the occupation of Paris by the Prussians, symbolized not so much a favoritism for French music, and a chauvinisme for German culture in the wake of invasion and national humiliation, as it was an artistic reaction to the decadence of Louis Napoléon and the Second Empire (Strasser 2001, 225–231). Musical patriotism, indeed, was equated with artistic renewal and not with anti-German sentiment, anti-Wagnerism, or the chauvinistic exclusion of music from outside France’s borders (236–238). Although in time the Société Nationale suffered its own internal factionalizations (which saw the resignation of Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886 and the formation of the rival Société de Musique Indépendante by Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, Florent Schmitt, and Charles Koechlin in 1910), the nationalist agenda of the organization to promulgate the value, role, and standing of French composers was entirely positive. In this regard, it not only witnessed an explosion of activity, a nurturing of talent, and a revitalization of the music profession but was also praised for the revival of the nation’s former revolutionary ethic of utility. In 1888, the Société Nationale de Musique requested that it be proclaimed an “établissement d’utilité publique,” a declaration which invoked a process of considerable scrutiny from bodies such as the conseil municipal and the minister of the interior in order to confirm whether its activities and ethics conformed with the value of public utility (Pasler 2009, 75n); through its passionate affirmation “Ars Gallica,” it sought to promote all that was good, socially beneficial, and healthy about modern French artistic aims (90).7 Moreover, the very presence and confidence of the Société was symptomatic of the newly elevated Parisian appetite for instrumental music, evident in the plethora of new chamber music societies which emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, among them the Nouvelle Société de Musique de Chambre (1873), the Quatuor Ste-Cécile, (1875), the Société des Quatuors Populaires (1877), the Société des Instruments à Vent (1879), the Société des Quatuors Modernes (1881), and the Quatuor Capet (1893).
The proliferation of the smaller society in the nineteenth century was highly symptomatic of the new scientific age and the desire to promote the notion of progress, self-improvement, sophistication, and that most desirable concept of civilized intercourse, the “conversazione.” In fact, discourse in most disciplines, including music, was often promulgated not just through societal affiliation but also through private clubs, university bodies, and associations, or even at the private residences of individuals. John Ella (1802–1888), later known for the establishment of the Musical Union in London, a body dedicated to the performance and popularization of chamber music, had cut his teeth in the organization of the Società Lirica (or “Saltoun Club”), a group of enthusiastic amateurs (and some professionals) who met at the London home of Lord Saltoun of Abernethy to study and perform operatic works (Bashford 2000, 197). Another eloquent example of the informal society in England was the Working Men’s Society, a private but exclusive association of four professional musicians—Edward Dannreuther, Frits Hartvigson, Karl Kindworth, Walter Bache, and a “lay member” Alfred Hipkins—who met at weekly intervals during the late 1860s to discuss and perform (in piano arrangements) a variety of modern works. Within the relaxed forum of these meetings, which were at the individuals’ homes, the music of Wagner (in Klindworth’s manuscript arrangements endorsed by the composer) and Liszt was played and discussed at a time when the works of these composers were unknown to the general public (Dibble 2000, 281–282; Allis 2012).
After much apathy toward music in English universities, the Cambridge University Musical Society (originally the Peterhouse Musical Society) rose in stature from very humble beginnings in 1843 until, under Charles Villiers Stanford’s direction, it attracted the annual visits of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), gave the first English performance of Brahms’s First Symphony in March 1877, and helped to promote much new European and British music. What is more, given its role as an educative body for the edification of undergraduates and the entertainment of cognoscenti in the university and city, its symbiotic relationship with the university was enshrined with the conferring of honorary doctorates on composers of national and international status. In 1876, Arthur Sullivan, John Goss, and Macfarren received honorary doctorates; they were followed by Hubert Parry (1883); Stanford (1888); Antonin Dvořák (1891); Edward Elgar, Frederic Cowen, and Horatio Parker (1900); and Aleksandr Glazunov (1907). The strategy reached its apogee in the 1893 Jubilee, when Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Max Bruch, and Arrigo Boïto all received degrees on the same day (Grieg, who was also due to receive an honorary doctorate, was too ill to attend, so his award was conferred in 1894). At the conclusion of this occasion, all met at a “conversazione” at the Fitzwilliam Museum, a “learned” symbol of the university with its established collection of musical manuscripts. Other societies sought to promote specialized interests, such as the Wagner societies, in Berlin, Leipzig, London, and Vienna, which not only celebrated the composer’s music in concerts but also helped to raise money to support the project at Bayreuth. The Wagner Society (now an international association) was in itself prototypical of later “composer” societies which sought to promote performances, lectures, competitions, and publications. In the case of the London Wagner Society, founded by Dannreuther, and aided by Hans von Bülow, its principal motivation was to introduce the public to a much wider range of the composer’s music at a time (in the early 1870s) when only Der fliegende Holländer and the overture to Tannhäuser had been aired in the opera house or concert hall, and to gainsay the denunciatory opinions of the critic Henry Chorley (1808–1872). Chorley’s invective served only to heighten the curiosity of London’s concert-going public and the Wagner concerts were extremely well attended.
In England, the private club also thrived as a forum of discussion and exchange of ideas, invariably accompanied by a good dinner. Such was the case with the Réunion des Arts in Harley Street (McVeigh 2000, 167). What is more, membership in clubs such as the Athenaeum (Cowell 1975), where the waiting list of members could be measured in years, was an additional mark of prestige, and for figures such as Stanford, John Stainer, Parry, and Elgar, membership effectively provided a sense of kudos second only to knighthood, and helped to raise the national status of the music profession. Other clubs such as the Savile and the Oxford & Cambridge attracted composers and authors (Anderson 1993), while a whole network of German clubs catered to the many ex-patriot Teutonic musicians (such as Hans Richter) who had made London their permanent home. Such places, as Lubenow has argued (Lubenow 2015, 71 passim), were highly fertile forums for the exchange of ideas—they included a diversity of activities including games rooms, poetry readings, erudite lectures, and a range of newspapers and journals—and in many ways matched the vibrant milieu of France’s “salon” culture, itself an informal yet potent channel for cultural debate. Some members—writers, critics, and hommes d’affaires—even chose to live there, and it is perhaps an indication of how important a role clubs played in the interconnectivity of life in London and elsewhere that the Reform Club, founded in 1834 and well known for its literary leanings, was unofficially the headquarters of the Liberal Party.
So far, discussion of institutions and societies has largely centered on the benefits that these bodies brought to the performance of music, to education, and to the growing need for national prestige. The benefits, however, of studying and appreciating music as an intellectual discipline were slower to emerge, but as musicology was increasingly recognized as a legitimate field of scholarship and research during the nineteenth century, the organizational and communicative advantages enjoyed by these societies was soon brought to bear on the subject. With the pan-European interest in folklore and ethnology, the enthusiasm for heritage-gathering and folk-song collecting found the animating influence of the society useful as a national focus, as was witnessed, for example, by the inauguration of the English Folk Song Society in London. A putative learned society, strongly endorsed by the national conservatories and universities who were there to sponsor its birth (Anon. 1899), the results of its research were published in the Journal of the Folk Song Society between 1899 and 1931; in later years the society would also house a major archive and library.
Some of the earliest evidence of musicological scholarship was manifested in the desire to establish a musical canon; and driven by this new historiographical awareness, a need to create monuments to individual composers—a statue of Mozart in Salzburg (1842), the Beethoven monument in Bonn (1845), the Handel monument in Halle (1859), and the Bach statue in Eisenach (1884)—went hand in hand with the preparation of complete editions (Denkmäler) such as the Bach Gesellschaft (1850) and the Handel Gesellschaft (1858), while the revival of interest in sixteenth-century church music, particularly through the agency of the Caecilien-Bündnisse (Cecilian League) and the scholarship of Franz Xaver Haberl (1840–1910), gave rise to the Palestrina Edition (1862). Editions, musical lexicography, biographies, bibliographies, the presence of music libraries (many of them part of learned societies), and antiquarian societies, not to mention the appetite for research in German universities, fueled an environment in which the scholar and intellectual could flourish. Winning an award from the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (Society for the Promotion of Music) in Amsterdam for his Lexikon der holländischen Tondichter in 1867, for example, Robert Eitner (1832–1905) was encouraged to found the pioneering Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in 1868, a musicological society dedicated to historical and theoretical research, and whose work was propagated through its monthly magazine, Monatshefte für Musik-Geschichte (first published in 1869). It was thanks to the editorial work of Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901), Philipp Spitta (1841–1894), and Guido Adler (1855–1941) on the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft between 1885 and 1894, which spearheaded musicology in Austria, although it was largely due to the work of Adler’s founding of the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut in Vienna that modern musicology was born. Adler’s influence and example would be key to the wider practice of musicology throughout Europe and to the international collaboration of musicological societies.8
While Italy and France were slow to institute their own societies of musicology (the Associazione dei Musicologi Italiani was not founded until 1908 and the Société Française de Musicologie not until 1917), England’s Musical Association followed swiftly after Eitner’s Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in 1874 (Dibble 2007, 174–177). However, it was in fact anticipated some years earlier by the Musical Institute of London, a short-lived organization (1851–1853) which devoted itself to “conversazioni” and the reading of papers. With aspirations of being a learned society, it maintained a reading room and a library at its London premises at 34 Sackville Street, Piccadilly. Perhaps because of its ephemeral existence, it has been overlooked as one of the very first organizations more formally devoted to musicology. Although English musicology could not in any way boast the same level or intensity of scholarship as was active in either Germany or Austria, the founding of the Musical Association was symptomatic of a growing interest in the subject among its founding scholars, such as Stainer and Frederick Ouseley at Oxford, as well as a new reforming mood in English universities to emulate the research ethic of its German counterparts. As a nonresident degree in British universities, music as a systematic study lacked a focus for developing musicology as a discipline, and its emphasis on technical competence accentuated its close relationship with the nation’s cathedral and church organists, who tended to be the majority of its supplicants.
Nevertheless, both Sterndale Bennett (at Cambridge) and Ouseley (at Oxford) responded to the impending university reforms by giving termly faculty lectures (which were open to the public) (Temperley 2006), a tradition built on by Stainer, Parry, and Stanford. The “public lecture” on music found its roots rather earlier in the nineteenth century, when William Crotch (1775–1847), then professor of music at Oxford, delivered lectures at the Royal Institution in London, but this has been the subject of scant attention. In suggesting that such events should be reassessed, Jamie Kassler has rightly pointed out that “in nineteenth-century England (and elsewhere) lectures on or relating to music and music theory were to become a powerful means of influencing public opinion and forming public taste” (Kassler 1983–85, 3). Originally devoted to the subjects of science and natural philosophy, the first full course of Crotch’s lectures on music took place in 1805 as a means of widening the scope of the institution (5); other lecturers include Samuel Wesley (1766–1837) and John Wall Callcott (1766–1821), and these events were attended by a wide range of professional and amateur musicians (23–28). The Royal Institution remained an important instrument for the diffusion of musicological ideas for the rest of the century, and certainly during the last twenty years, courses of musical lectures by such figures as Parry, Dannreuther, Alexander Mackenzie, and Henry Walford Davies were not only well attended but also often fully documented in current journals, such as the Musical Times (Anon. 1915). The subject of musical education, meanwhile, became a focus for the Royal Society of Arts.
The Musical Association was largely populated by university men, and much of its early musicological exploration was devoted to scientific and acoustical questions, reflecting many of the scientifically orientated members such as Sedley Taylor (1834–1920), William Pole (1814–1900), William Spottiswoode (1825–1883), John Tyndall (1820–1893), and Robert Bosanquet (1841–1912). Later meetings, however, focused on historical issues and musical criticism. Although it did not match the learned status of the Musical Institute, it was much more efficient in publishing its proceedings, which included not only the papers but also subsequent discussion. The mission of the Musical Association was one of democratizing musicology at much the same time as George Grove (one of the Association’s earliest members) was preparing the Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the first major popular lexicon. As the Association began to widen its membership, it also found itself to be part of a growing sentiment of internationalization—one felt among many societies both in Britain and in continental Europe. The setting up of an International Association of Academies in Wiesbaden in 1899 at the behest of the Royal Prussian Academy was symptomatic of a broader desire to share research internationally (Cochrane 1978, 163; Lubenow 2015, 89), and musicology was no exception, with the First Congress of the International Musical Society which convened in Paris in July 1900 as part of the Exposition universelle (Tyrrell and Wise 1979, 2–3). Significantly, this congress was convened under the larger umbrella of the Paris “Exposition universelle,” and the intention was clearly to lend status to the discipline as a transnational phenomenon. The exhibition, which attracted 51 million visitors, was larger than any that Paris had organized before and its foci were the scientific and engineering legacies of the previous century, featuring many historical displays and the meteoric scientific discoveries of electricity. In this respect, musicology was now not only something in which the state wished to invest money and education but also a transnational phenomenon in which states and their learned societies were the subject of international scrutiny. Moreover, it is evident from the program of papers and those who delivered them that the congress was harnessed as a “shop window” for the hosts. The vast majority of scholars who delivered papers in Paris were French. At the Second Congress in Basel in September 1906, Germanic musicology, with its strong emphases on theory and aesthetics, was the principal focus—one repeated with even greater alacrity at the much-expanded Third Congress in Vienna in May 1909, where “the Austrian court and State and also the Municipality of the capital vied with each other in providing many most brilliant and artistic displays in every branch of the art, and also a long sequence of most lavish hospitality” (Anon. 1911, 160). At the Fourth Congress in London in May and June 1911, the fledgling elements of British musicology, eclectically influenced by a mixture of evolutionism and Hegelian Idealism, were given a wider context by the presence of concert programs exclusively featuring British composers across the centuries. As the editor of the Musical Times made clear, the rationale of the occasion was “to make it a great and memorable festival of British music” (160).
Although many musical organizations found their origins in earlier centuries, especially the seventeenth, the notion of exploiting music as an agency of the state owes its origins to post-revolutionary France. The new, centralized French state saw music as a means of public utility which could serve the population through the material means of education and public ceremony. The French government also identified that music had the power to civilize society, one which it sought to harness as a means of prestige and which by dint of state recognition lent music a new status intellectually equal to those of the sciences. In this way, by the creation of “learned societies,” it was able to confer exalted positions to its own citizens and those from other countries, thereby endorsing elevated standards for the nation. This included the establishment of libraries, educational bodies, publications, and public lectures. Many countries followed the French model while others pursued similar aims by different routes. With the rise of national consciousness and the search for identity and cultural consensus, state-sponsored “learned societies” proliferated across Europe, which encouraged a zeal for organization on many levels. While some of these were financed by government, others were the result of a new democratic sensibility which emerged as a means of sharing knowledge. During the nineteenth century, the concept of the musical society and institution burgeoned as the desire increased for the promulgation of both practical and theoretical disciplines. The nature of the societies varied from the formal to the entirely informal, and in the case of concert societies, unions, and private clubs, the motivation was fueled as much by a need for social intercourse as for artistic edification. With the advances in publishing technology, and the advent of musicology as a discipline, the society also became an ideal vehicle for the establishment of the musical canon, via the creation of complete scholarly editions (such as the Bach Gesellschaft) and the promotion of individual composers such as Wagner. Ultimately, the society and all those who devoted time to such organizations were instruments in the larger epistemological revolution of which the nineteenth century was the archetypal catalyst.