Our notion of the concert series is so allied to the symphony orchestra model that it comes as something of a jolt to realize that this was so fragile a concept for much of the nineteenth century. Yet it eventually achieved undisputed permanence alongside opera and church music—even replicating the church calendar in the pattern of weekly concerts. Drawing on a variety of models from the previous century, including (male) academies and (predominantly female) society assemblies, the concert series eventually attained both intellectual and social stature as the prime site of musical listening with no further purpose attached.
This development both reflected and supported the centrality of the symphony and string quartet within the emerging canon, with the concomitant expectation of serious attention and veneration for the “work.” Indeed, the concert series did much to formalize the idea of musical experience as an intellectual pursuit. If, around 1800, music was still struggling for a place in the “German republic of learning,” for Kant as ephemeral and indiscriminate as the scent on a perfumed handkerchief (Applegate 2005, 57), its status on an aesthetic plane was soon elevated by writers such as Schiller and Hoffmann. Yet it still required the practical advocacy of musicians themselves to connect to a higher literary culture or intellectual level—and it was within the context of the concert series that this drama was played out (Gramit 2002, 20–21).
The broad lines of this development have been mapped by William Weber: the rapid increase of concerts in the 1830s and the temporary age of the virtuoso, then mid-century consolidation leading to the solidification of more or less modern patterns by 1870 (Weber [1975] 2004, 7–8; Weber 2008a; see also Müller 2014). Music itself eventually achieved an unassailable position within intellectual debate about cultural and artistic value, elevated in status and discussed with the seriousness expected of philosophy, literature, and the fine arts. The concert series thus became emblematic of high culture, of Romantic idealism, and of a particular form of bourgeois cultural representation. At the same time, its relation with intellectual and cultural life was explicitly articulated in a burgeoning literary apparatus, from press criticism and philosophical or historical tracts to biographies, concert guides, and program notes.
Yet this very positioning raised a different debate about the wider role of music within society—one expressed in a constant concern about artistic degeneration and the perils of commercialization, exacerbated by alternative sites of musical entertainment and by the expansion of music to wider audiences. Typically this has been viewed as a division between “high” and “low,” but this simple binary divide was undercut by the repeated attempts—moral, social, philanthropic, commercial—to assert a universal public culture. Certainly, cultural aspiration was invariably associated with moral rectitude or with a liberal agenda of personal improvement and character building.
The concert series therefore emerged as a cauldron for heated debate regarding the hierarchy of genres, different publics, and sites and styles of presentation. The dominant mode of institutional histories, confidently positioning organizations within an ordered narrative of cultural progress and national significance, has served to reinforce a canonization of institutions that reproduces nineteenth-century rhetoric. But in reality there was constant interaction with social, political, and aesthetic factors, and with commercial and professional demands, as “the indomitable spirit of modernity and progress unleashed the combined forces of class, history, and nation onto nineteenth-century culture” (Rehding 2009, 41). Recent research has accordingly veered from the supply side toward the listener as consumer, recognizing the increasing fluidity of musicians, repertoires, and literary discourse across the century, as well as across both national and taste boundaries.
Indeed, the more we learn, the more complex and diverse the picture appears: the concert series represented contested space throughout the century, its status manipulated by musicians and audiences, by critics and philosophers, by patrons and politicians, by impresarios, piano makers and music publishers. Reflecting new approaches to performance history that have profoundly shifted the balance from “text” to “event,” this chapter will seek to open up a wide variety of perspectives on the role of the concert series in relation to intellectual cross-currents during the century.
Two concert series in Paris in the 1830s immediately illustrate this contestation. The Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire (1828–1967), inspired by violinist-conductor François Habeneck (1781–1849), advocated a Beethoven symphonic repertoire as an alternative to the supremely dominant position of opera. Taste leadership was swiftly adopted by an alliance of aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie: indeed, elite subscriptions became so valued that they were passed down through families for generations. With state subsidy and free use of the Conservatoire hall, these concerts immediately succeeded in “sanctifying classical music as official high culture,” directly supporting the Orleanist regime (Weber [1975] 2004, 84). In sharp contrast was the new entrepreneurial culture of Philippe Musard (1792–1859). His populist instrumental concerts, revolving around his own quadrilles and galops, were aimed at large mixed audiences through low prices and relaxed settings, whether outdoors on the Champs-Elysées or in lavishly decorated indoor “promenade concert” halls (Cooper 1983, 90–91; Weber [1975] 2004, 125–131; Weber 2008a, 214–215).
In London, too, the group of thirty musicians who formed the Philharmonic Society in 1813 adopted a fervently missionary tone in revitalizing instrumental music through canonic symphonic concerts (and direct contact with Beethoven), while during the 1840s Louis-Antoine Jullien (1812–1860) escalated the Musard model from promenade concerts at a theater to Monster Concerts with ever more sensationalist effects at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, accommodating 12,000 people (Carse 1951, 39–54). Bringing the ambience of the dance floor and military band into the concert setting introduced a new physicality into the relationship between performers and audience—one only exaggerated by the focus on the flamboyant conductor, who played as astutely on the audience as on the massed forces before him.
A similar dichotomy obtained elsewhere. In Vienna, the Concert Spirituel (founded in 1819) offered among the most rigid canonical programs, combining orchestral and choral repertoire (Weber 2008a, 200–204), while during the 1830s the elder Johann Strauss, the “waltz king,” was still more successful than Musard and Jullien in nurturing a craze for dance music in the concert hall (Scott 2008, 131–133; Spitzer 2008). Likewise, Berlin’s traditional court concerts and the classical soirées of Concertmeister Carl Möser contended both with outdoor military band concerts and with the cheap orchestral programs offered by Josef Gungl beginning in 1843 (Mahling 1980). In Boston, the predominantly classical symphony concerts of the Boston Academy, founded by an older elite, were challenged that same year by a new Philharmonic Society, run by businessmen and music dealers, who alertly identified a niche for lighter, more vocal concerts targeting a broader public (Broyles 1992, 182–214, 235–244).
Both directions presented a challenge to the old ways of the eighteenth century, and the new sites of authority, commercial opportunities, and expanding audiences were as characteristic of the 1830s as the proliferation of classical symphony concerts. And popular genres enjoyed an equally cosmopolitan embrace, as Strauss waltzes conquered Europe’s concert halls through highly lucrative tours. Yet the separation between artistic and commercial ventures was not always so clear-cut, and it would be a mistake to leap to glib assumptions about class and commodification, or even repertoire. The serious classical concert and its more accessible alternatives developed alongside each other, even as they variously merged or interacted. Jullien may have been the showman extraordinaire, with his white kid gloves and jeweled baton carried on a salver for Beethoven, yet his astute programming and commanding audience rapport remained influential on concert promotion across Europe and North America for years to come.
Austro-German symphonic music claimed the high ground from the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Clearly, “musical idealism”—to use William Weber’s term (2008a, 86–88, 92–99), though not universally accepted—boasts connections not only with German philosophical idealism but also with the transcendental vision of Romantics such as Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, particularly in its aspiration to the lofty realms of the infinite sublime. The primacy of instrumental music and the universality of the symphony as the highest art form, especially Beethoven (as famously expressed by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1810), are readily invoked (Bonds 2006, 44–50). Yet, as James Garratt has argued, “there is no inherent link between the Romantic transcendental or idealist aesthetic of instrumental music” and those “separatist forms of autonomy” stressing the distance of art from the socio-political sphere (Garratt 2010, 27). Certainly, at a more practical level, contemplation of music was intensely grounded in actual performance, through which musicians themselves bestowed aesthetic value; and it was the formality of the public concert series that provided the essential platform for this exchange, since it was here that music was listened to for its own sake, unyoked to any other social function. The symphony in particular—as a form of public oration—requires an audience to engage in active listening, preferably in a setting where the same work can be repeatedly heard. Indeed, as early as 1812, the Swiss musician Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) directly linked the role of the intellect in artistic appreciation to discussion of concerts as the center of public musical life (Gramit 2002, 134–135).
The prominence of the concert series was most obvious in Leipzig, a Protestant burgher town unencumbered by absolutist rule. The Gewandhaus concerts were forged by an alliance of merchants and scholars, symbolized by the transformation of the Cloth Hall into a concert room in 1781. This austere and unornamented setting was presided over by the muse Polyhymnia and the logo “Res Severa Verum Gaudium” (“True Joy is a Serious Matter”): it is easy to identify here the roots of the so-called sacralization of concert life (Pieper 2008, 106–109). Concentration on the music was aided by distillation of repertoire (at one concert in 1807 the second half was, quite exceptionally, devoted solely to Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony) and by an equally rare, silent attentiveness, as remarked by the American visitor Lowell Mason in 1852 (Mason 1854, 26).
Such concerts embodied the utopian liberal view of a metaphorical assembly indifferent to social class (Hegel’s “collective subjectivity”), in which musical experience was shared with audience neighbors confident of a mutual aesthetic—one resolutely confirmed by the contemporary musical press. It is tempting to view this concert culture as symbolic of an aspirant bourgeoisie after 1815, whereby the self-definition of the individual contributed to the development of a worthier society; or (in Jürgen Habermas’s terms) as a trial for a new public sphere predicated upon individual autonomy (Habermas [1962] 1989). The view that the bourgeoisie, inspired by far-sighted musicians, should raise musical culture above both the frivolities of aristocratic opera and the degraded preferences of the lower classes is one repeatedly expressed in music periodicals across Europe. In this view, the serious concert objectified well-ordered culture (mirroring the well-ordered machine of the orchestra) in an aestheticized version of the mechanized industrialization from which they sought escape.
But there remains a danger, as several scholars have observed, in linking the serious concert to an idealism arising from the middle class, or projecting it as an inevitable outgrowth of the development of bourgeois society (Gramit 2002, 126; Weber 2008a, 90–91). For a start, there were numerous layers within the middle class; and in many capitals it was actually from the union of aristocratic and upper-middle classes that an educated urban elite eventually emerged. Even in Leipzig there were complaints about the monopolistic musical control that excluded the less wealthy (Weber 2008a, 53, 108–109). We should also be wary of assuming uniformity, either across the Western world or outside its metropolises. Nevertheless, there remain striking similarities in the development of public concert series across different intellectual, cultural, and religious environments—in part because, while symphonic music (and Beethoven in particular) was central to an Austro-German identity, it quickly attained a cosmopolitan value far beyond Leipzig, Berlin, or Vienna. Just as in Paris and London, it had a profound effect in the United States, where—encouraged by a constant influx of German musicians—the Austro-German symphony came to reflect universal moral values and a democratically unified society.
The characteristics of musical idealism identified by William Weber (2008a, 97)—serious demeanor and silent listening, reverence for the integral work of art, musical classics, and a defined hierarchy of genres, accompanied by a requirement for learning—are obviously linked to the so-called sacralization of the concert experience: the devotion to a religion of art where the listener is immersed in aesthetic contemplation, as described by Wackenroder in 1797 (Dahlhaus [1980] 1989, 80–87). The language used by contemporary critics (the temple of art, the faithful listeners, the evangelical role of the priestly performer) certainly suggests religious connotations, despite the disruptive radicalism of Beethoven’s own music. Thus the Boston critic J. S. Dwight (1813–1893)—strongly influenced by American Transcendentalism (a version of German idealism) and by the utopianism of Charles Fourier—lectured in 1841 not only that music was “a sort of Holy Writ” but also that abstract instrumental music uncorrupted by language constituted the highest form of sacred music (Broyles 1992, 254–257).
It is true that the solemn mysteries of musical art were revealed at the far end of elongated new halls, some of which—like London’s St. James’s Hall—were indeed styled like a church. In 1907, Ernst Haiger even posited a “Tempels für die symphonische Musik,” combining a Grecian façade with a Christian interior, where the entire orchestra would sit in a sunken pit (as at Bayreuth) with the ascendant choir behind resembling a heavenly host (Schwab 2008, 435–441). Yet for some scholars the notion of sacralization has been overplayed, one argument being that such critics used religious imagery only within particular contexts or as a metaphor for much broader human experience (Saloman 2009, 159; Newman 2010, 114–117). Certainly for Dwight—a Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist for whom social utopianism was a driving force—the spiritual realms of the symphony went far beyond established religion.
Perhaps of more universal significance was the emphasis on music’s intellectual qualities, requiring prior study and structured listening (Johnson 1995; Saloman 2009, Cavicchi 2011). Silent attentiveness may have represented a profoundly unnatural “ideal of self-control for the sake of exquisite, if postponed, psychological rewards” (Gay 1996, 22–23), yet it only served to intensify music’s mystical presence. Thus at his Musical Union concerts, John Ella sternly enforced attentive listening with exhortations in the printed program (“il più grand’omaggio all musica, è nel silenzio) (Bashford 2007, 139–141). How far such listening was “active” in the sense promulgated by Roland Barthes (“a psychological act”; Barthes [1982] 1985, 245) has been much disputed. A persistent trope has always represented the rows of immobile listeners as receptive consumers engaged in (merely) passive listening. Yet more recently scholars have sought to defend concert practices as a process of aestheticizing through listening (Cavicchi 2011, 187), whereby the sharing and comparison of “multiple pasts and multiple presents” achieves a consensus of public opinion and social cohesion (Pasler 2009, 230).
If listening was indeed an acquired skill (or more broadly an attribute of liberal “character”), it required guidance from experts, a literate musical intelligentsia; indeed, the articulate and forceful music criticism developed in the new German music journals was as much directed toward debate about the taste of the concert public as toward new compositions themselves. The novelistic esprits of Schumann’s imaginary Davidsbündler against the Philistines and the fulminations against the superficiality and commercialism of the Paris piano virtuoso world in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik were (though not overtly political) nonetheless aligned with the literary radicalism of the Junges Deutschland movement of the 1830s (Weber 2008a, 90, 110–111). Later in the century critical writing about music, and specifically about concert life, took on a still more central role in directing the way in which audiences understood music, notably through Eduard Hanslick in Vienna, while some concert series went so far as to run their own periodicals for subscribers.1 As critics contended with composers and performers for a new professional authority, they even intervened directly, as when the New York critic George Templeton Strong (1820–1875) took over in 1870 as president of the Philharmonic, exerting a powerful influence over repertoire and audience behavior alike.
Richard Sennett has put this bluntly: “People wanted to be told about what they were going to feel or what they ought to feel” (Sennett [1977] 2002, 209). This literary turn, whereby writing and talking about music gained a parallel importance to listening and making music, took many other forms in the later nineteenth century (Botstein 1992). Most relevant here is the impetus to guide audiences in their concert experience through the development of the printed concert program. Once again, Leipzig led the way in identifying the separate movements of the “Eroica,” with the briefest descriptive comments (Lanzendörfer 2019, 172–175). But it was in Britain that the idea of historical and analytical program notes took root—most prominently in the reverential atmosphere of John Ella’s Musical Union and later in the substantial notes that George Grove crafted for the Crystal Palace orchestral concerts, rich in diverse cultural references (Bashford 2003; Bower 2016). Detailed program notes with musical examples offered listeners not only an emotional itinerary to follow but also an aerial analytical map that encouraged a quite different mode of listening.
As Christina Bashford has elucidated, the very idea of the extended program note added significantly to the cultural status of concerts in Britain, a counterfoil to their essentially commercial basis, by appealing to a range of literary, biblical, and scientific associations: music was thus forcefully absorbed into the world of the literary and philosophical society (Bashford 2019). Even the design of program booklets reflects their intellectual environment, from the masthead of Ella’s program (depicting Melodia, Apollo, and Harmonia) to the sensuous female images “that suggested fertility, spirituality, and the imagination” in Paris of the 1890s—themselves to be replaced by abstract designs and neoclassical imagery in the new century, mirroring not only aesthetic shifts but also a return to aristocratic leadership in musical life (Pasler [1993] 2008a, 413–414).
By the end of the century, the idea of program notes had spread across Europe and North America, and collections of texts began to be published on the model of Baedeker’s tourist guides (Thorau 2019). Thus Hermann Kretzschmar’s Führer durch den Konzertsaal (Guide through the Concert Hall, 1886) walked the listener through the entire concert repertoire in historical order; another influential self-help guide was How to Listen to Music (1896) by the New York critic Henry Krehbiel (1854–1923), directed toward the experience of listening rather than the music itself.
At orchestral concerts, such literary analysis was simultaneously made visible through the conductor (especially the new breed of interpreters such as Liszt, Wagner, and Hans von Bülow), who viscerally acted out the music’s emotional course on the platform—a showmanship in sharp contrast to, and perhaps in compensation for, the immobility of the audience members. Silent listening was of course only one element of the orderly discipline of spectatorship, that marker of bourgeois refinement that Daniel Cavicchi has termed “audiencing” (Cavicchi 2011, 4). Etiquette regarding when to show emotions and when to applaud developed quite differently from in the opera house, at least before Wagner’s Bayreuth. The standard “shoe-box” shape of the new symphony halls was not only acoustically sound but also funneled attention toward the ritual at the far end, while the sense of separation was increased with the dimming of the house lights toward the end of the century. At the same time, the undifferentiated layout of such halls brought the listening public together on a single level—a visibly democratic unification of the middle and upper classes.
In 1825, A. B. Marx encapsulated the notion of hierarchy that was to condition concert life ever after, singling out those genres “whose performance is the only justification for calling a concert great. That is the symphony and the cantata” (Gramit 2002, 129). In this context, one can hardly overstate the importance of Mendelssohn’s appointment in 1835 as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts. While he did not entirely eschew Italian arias and piano solos, Mendelssohn restored the emphasis on serious symphonic literature, chamber works, and choral music (including that of Bach and Handel); even concertos were limited to those of more earnest aspiration (Sposato 2018, 251–263). His conception of unimpeachable musical ideals was assuredly directed toward a gebildete Gesellschaft (educated society) that extended across Germany and beyond, a conviction that soon came to be regarded as an alternative pole to Wagner’s Bayreuth (Eshbach 2014, 28–29).
It is symbolic of the enduring relationship between the symphony concert and serious musical experience that Rebecca Grotjahn should have chosen to identify a “Gewandhaus model” of programming, based on Beethoven’s symphonies (Grotjahn 1998, 102). Such a framework enshrined a reflective process—quite alien to eighteenth-century practice—whereby audiences were constantly reminded of the repetition of individual works, as well as being alerted to novelties. Lydia Goehr’s “imaginary museum” (1992) indeed reflects contemporary rhetoric: in 1856, the Paris Conservatoire repertoire was proudly described as “the Louvre of musical art” (Holoman 2004, 197). Yet in reality it was a rotating exhibition founded on the cycle of Beethoven symphonies, against which new entrants must be critically weighed, while established repertoires (Cherubini overtures, Spohr symphonies), even entire genres, were unceremoniously dropped.
One cherished principle of eighteenth-century programming came under constant attack: the alternation of vocal and instrumental items, now associated with commercialism’s worst excesses and famously mocked by Berlioz as a jumble “of Italian cavatinas, fantasias for piano, excerpts from Masses, flute concertos, lieder with solo trombone obbligato, bassoon duets, and the like” (Berlioz [1956] 1973, 188). The development of specialist concert genres—symphony concert, chamber recital, choral concert—may have reflected the expansion of the urban market, but it clearly had deeper roots, whereby the concert projected an integral experience with an intellectual rationale, even a psychological voyage toward the final piece. The items themselves were to relate coherently, as did each concert in a series, in a logical extension of the organicism embodied in individual works.
The most extreme example, both of concentrated programming and of the segregation of high culture, was the chamber music concert. As early as 1804, Beethoven’s quartet violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh (1776–1830) presented programs limited to three or four serious chamber works, and this pattern (which referenced both male amateur practices and the model of learned societies) has persisted to this day. Intimate chamber music societies for professional performance of canonic repertoire proliferated in the second third of the nineteenth century, with the late Beethoven quartets becoming a touchstone for esoteric connoisseurship, as at Paris’s Société des Derniers Quatuors de Beethoven. Over succeeding decades it was Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) who personified this tradition through his celebrated Berlin and London quartet series, with the highly selective addition of new works as far forward as Brahms. Drawing on the reverential attitude toward music and the spiritual ideals he had imbibed from Mendelssohn and from Berlin salon culture, Joachim’s concerts epitomized the sacerdotal. He even defined himself this way (“Artists should not be servants, but priests of the public,” he wrote in 1853), and half a century later one student replicated exactly the same sentiment: “There was something venerable and priestlike in the appearance of the four elderly men earnestly applying themselves to their task and one felt a reverent and almost religious spirit in their whole performance” (quoted in Eshbach 2014, 22–23). The listening experience at such serious chamber concerts starkly contrasted with the distant ritual of symphony concerts (the impersonal machine of individuals working together under a single charismatic conductor). When at Joachim’s concerts or at the Musical Union a quartet played in the center of the hall, surrounded by listeners in the round, this may have emphasized the inwardness of four players communing in private conversation; yet it still involved the audience in a three-dimensional spatial and thus aural experience (Bashford 2007, 136–137).
Where does vocal music fit into this hierarchy? After all, the legacy of the mimetic aesthetic of the eighteenth century, confirming the higher realm of vocal music, was still competing with the newly asserted status of instrumental genres; and of course the romantic obsession with text and literature provided powerful counterbalance. As the Marx quotation reminds us, serious vocal genres could still be placed on a level with the highest forms of instrumental music. In practice, choral music weaved a varied and somewhat ambiguous path through symphony concert programming. While in part this reflected the proclivities of amateur choral groups, there were aesthetic and cultural factors too, reflecting audience appreciation of the emotional and spiritual value of elaborate choral music, as well as the sense of community it engendered. Thus, in Leipzig (where sacred music had originally been partitioned into separate Concerts Spirituels), the two concert types merged, so that even before Mendelssohn’s tenure it was common to schedule sacred works or elevated opera choruses alongside symphonies and concertos (Sposato 2018, 243–250). Sometimes this provided a space for older music, but Mendelssohn himself developed the genre of symphonic psalm settings so powerfully as to confirm definitively the translation of sacred music from church into concert hall.
A particular object of scorn for high-flown critics lay in Italian opera extracts—a residue of eighteenth-century programming—along with those related fantasies so favored by piano virtuosi. For such critics, both genres reeked of commercialization and aristocratic frivolity, although in practice most organizations allowed compromise (even Mendelssohn programmed arias by Bellini and Donizetti). The aesthetic distinctions implicit in this supposed Beethoven–Rossini axis have recently been the subject of subtle revaluation (Mathew and Walton 2013), and it might be misleading to swallow wholesale the rhetoric of selected contemporary critics. But it is certainly true that, by the middle of the century, snatches of modern Italian opera had been banished from most symphony concert series. The subsequent return of the theater in the form of Wagner extracts—as in Richter’s concerts in Vienna and London—was very much an exceptional case, reflecting in part the symphonic nature of Wagner’s operatic idiom. In Paris, the association with Stéphane Mallarmé and the Symbolists, and in London with Aubrey Beardsley and the Aesthetic movement, gave Wagnerism particular cachet, but it was the raw emotional power of his orchestral canvas that was to capture a wider public in the last decades of the century.
Meanwhile, outside the rarefied atmosphere of chamber and symphony concerts, the old forms of miscellaneous mixed programs continued with remarkable tenacity, despite the tide of critical contempt, and even chamber concerts were often leavened with piano solos and Lieder. Nevertheless, a marked shift occurred around 1860. Purely virtuoso recitals gave way to more balanced programs including canonic repertoire, while some pianists began to organize coherent concert series along historical lines, such as Charles Hallé’s Beethoven sonata cycles from 1861 or Anton Rubinstein’s seven-concert chronological survey in New York in 1873. The rhetoric altered, too. On one recital tour three years later, von Bülow directly addressed his Chicago audience: “I worship always in the temples of the great masters” (Lott 2003, 246).
So far we have concentrated on reception, but it is also crucial to recognize changing professional and economic imperatives, as musicians increasingly took responsibility for defining aesthetic value away from patrons and connoisseurs. Yet they could only achieve this with the support of a complex international web of artistic, ideological, and financial transactions.
It has often been remarked that the musical idealism of Romanticism was only enabled by economic freedom and its associated commercial infrastructures (journalism, publishing, instruments, international travel)—the paradox being that “only that which is for sale can transcend the bounds of the material world” (Cressman 2016, 69). Admittedly, some concert-giving organizations remained alliances of amateurs, in the tradition of eighteenth-century academies and learned societies; thus the Harvard Musical Association (1840) supported a series of refined chamber music concerts in Boston, alongside lectures and a library. But even the most high-minded concert institutions typically operated in a commercial environment where financial risk and marketing decisions ruled. Thus while London’s Musical Union may have been projected as a learned society, to give an air of authority and connoisseurship, in truth John Ella ran the series entirely at his own risk (Bashford 2007, 123–124). In late-century Paris, no fewer than three Sunday-afternoon series competed for the symphony orchestra public, each led by a prominent conductor seeking a role distinct from the entrenched Conservatoire concerts. Thus Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires (1861–84) presented classics at low prices; Édouard Colonne reintroduced Berlioz and promoted French music as part of an eclectic program; while Lamoureux targeted a more affluent clientele and a more reverential aura, beginning in 1882 to present whole acts of Wagner, whose music had endured a politically conditioned exile after the Franco-Prussian War (Pasler 2009, 464–472).
A different form of professional control rested with those orchestras that developed their own self-managing structures, as with London’s Philharmonic Society which exerted authority by screening subscribers on artistic rather than social principles (Ehrlich 1995, 19). Most remarkable in this direction was the Germania Musical Society, an American touring orchestra formed by German immigrants in 1848 under an explicitly democratic—not to say communist—ideal, matching the utopian vision of the socialist émigré Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) with their motto “One for All and All for One” (Newman 2010, 2). The notion of the orchestra as a republic in which individual virtuosity was sublimated within the greater whole worked as a metaphor for an ordered society, and indeed provided a model for the audience itself. To quote the pioneering American conductor Theodore Thomas (1835–1905), “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera” (Thomas 1905, 1); not for nothing was the very term “symphony orchestra” an American invention.
Sometimes bourgeois leadership took more tangible form, as an initiative of the business community or other local interests. Thus in Manchester, the Hallé concerts were a response to a civic desire for cultural status in the wake of a pivotal 1857 art exhibition, strongly backed by the German merchant community (Beale 2007, 87–132). A banker, Henry Higginson, founded and bankrolled the Boston Symphony, bringing over as conductor the German baritone Georg Henschel (1850–1934), an associate of Brahms, and continuing to import German musicians through his European contacts. By contrast, the Chicago Symphony was America’s first genuinely corporate orchestra, initiated in 1890 by Protestant captains of industry to promote musical art “by any and every lawful means”—a signal of the diverse business ventures they had in mind for the orchestra (Clague 2012, 48–49).
Yet nothing compared to the prestige of a new symphony concert hall. Boston and Chicago had to wait until 1900 and 1904, but the late nineteenth century had already ushered in a swathe of grandiose, purpose-built halls, either joining an urban cultural quarter (as with the Vienna Musikverein) or initiating one in the case of Leipzig’s new Gewandhaus (Veit et al. 2008, 7). The latter, built in 1882–84, contrasted markedly with its predecessor, its opulence mirroring the more ostentatious values of the late nineteenth-century Bürgertum (Pieper 2008, 140–141). The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam actually preceded the foundation of a permanent orchestra, through a concerted investment by the local bourgeoisie in a significant cultural statement close to the Rijksmuseum (Cressman 2016, 58–59).
Behind all these conspicuous cultural initiatives lay a whole array of commercial interests and middlemen. Impresarios like Robert Newman at London’s Queen’s Hall, and agents such as Hermann Wolff in Berlin and Albert Gutmann in Vienna, were increasingly influential on artistic decisions, acting like eighteenth-century connoisseurs in regulating taste and mediating between musicians and audience (Weber 2008b, 86–87). Thus Wolff operated in partnership with the Meiningen court orchestra, forcefully screening the commercial potential of the programs that their conductor von Bülow proposed (Hinrichsen 2008, 160–162). Symbiotic relationships developed with many other music businesses, including instrument makers and publishers, many of whom built their own concert halls for the purpose. The Paris piano makers Pleyel and Erard were particularly active in organizing their own concerts, positioned somewhere between the salon and the public platform (Schnapper 2008, 249–251).
Commodification—so often used as a stick with which to beat more popular concert forms—was clearly an intrinsic part of “high culture.” The competitive marketing techniques used by promoters in their programming, by agents in creating and differentiating publics, and by publishers and instrument makers showed a sharply observant eye toward shifting public taste. Above all, the concert series played a central role in selling culture itself, whether for artistic elevation, civic pride, or personal improvement. As Jann Pasler has argued, the notion of concerts as a public good, emblematic of democratic health and national progress, is itself not necessarily inconsistent with commercial interests (Pasler 2008b, 334–337). But there remained intrinsic tensions between the two.
A recurrent vision, especially during the first half of the century, was of a utopian universality: a bourgeois optimism that saw public subscription concerts, guided by knowledgeable artists, as a museum wherein to develop public taste (Gramit 2002, 154). Yet this utopian campaign harbored constant insecurity about the universal validity of the high-culture public concert. Sometimes this was expressed in totalitarian terms; the composer and writer Ignaz von Mosel (1772–1844), lamenting the “decay of music” as early as 1818, urged that bad programs by mediocre musicians should be actively prevented: “Who should give a public concert? What should be performed there? Where can it be given?” (Weber 2008a, 117). The Paris Conservatoire officers even tried to stifle a series of cheap orchestral concerts (Weber [1975] 2004, 103), while in his whimsical Evenings with the Orchestra Berlioz evokes an authoritarian utopia in a town called Euphonia where inhabitants provide the orchestra for gigantic music festivals controlled directly by the conductor-composer (Berlioz [1956] 1973, 283–289).
Usually, however, faith persisted in the “trickle down” of enhancing public taste, in “making good music popular” at least for a moderately well-educated segment of society. As early as 1810, E. T. A. Hoffmann frankly divided audiences into good and bad listeners, implying that the “musical rabble” simply needed to be trained to appreciate Beethoven. To this end, Schilling advocated bringing in symphonies gradually (Gramit 2002, 139)—a practical medicine indeed observable both in Berlin programs and in those of Jullien, who “went on, gradually increasing wholesome doses, till his treatment of his patient (the public) at length prevailed” (Carse 1951, 130). Critics of course were to play a central role in the development of good judgment. Although throughout the 1820s, A. B. Marx was caustic about the failures of Berlin concert life, he nevertheless retained his belief in listeners’ potential to develop through well-designed programming (Pederson 1994).
By the middle of the century, however, such a utopian and optimistic vision of universality was already fading. “Trickle down” was simply not succeeding in making high art sufficiently accessible, and instead of a broadly shared culture, a divided public seemed the inevitable result of the commodification of concert life. For the critic Franz Brendel (1811–1868), who adopted revolutionary rhetoric in promoting the arts for social and political reform (in 1848 he even advocated a “Kunstparliament” to transfer aesthetic responsibility to the state), the failure of the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848–49 brought acute disillusion. Equally committed to an alliance of the democratization of art with a progressive musical agenda, Liszt too gradually shifted to a more elitist position during the 1850s (Garratt 2010, 187–192), and even in England, Matthew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy, 1859) felt compelled to bemoan the detachment that the emerging mantra of “art for art’s sake” appeared to embody.
Thus by 1850, the reality of different concerts for different tastes was widely accepted, with a clear dichotomy between the unashamedly populist café-concerts in Paris or the ballad concerts of London publishers, and the hegemonic classical sphere: “After the middle of the century formal concert series, principally those of symphony orchestras, became the most important foundation for the unified elite within musical life” (Weber [1975] 2004, 50). The archetypal symphony concert was transforming into a self-consciously conservative force, adhering to an unassailable canon and stoutly resisting Brendel’s strenuous advocacy of the New German School of Liszt and Wagner. At the Leipzig Gewandhaus after Mendelssohn, classical repertoire dominated to such an extent that, at the opening ceremony of the new hall in 1884, not one item was by a living composer (Pieper 2008, 142). Admittedly this was an exception rather than a universal norm, and one should never underestimate the allure of the ever-more colorful and emotionally charged palette that Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Richard Strauss brought to the concert hall. But it was in the established symphony concerts that a lasting alliance was forged between a high-art (but essentially conservative) aesthetic outlook and an upper-middle-class sense of identity.
The distinction between high and low was graphically encapsulated in dual-function orchestras such as the Boston Symphony, whose summer promenade concerts resembled those at Austrian and German gardens. After von Bülow took over the Berlin Philharmonic in 1887, he delegated a parallel series of cheaper “Populären Konzerte” to lesser conductors (Hinrichsen 2008, 165), while at the Paris zoo in the 1890s no fewer than three levels were differentiated: Sunday concerts populaires, afternoon promenade concerts in the Palmarium, and an evening series of new and historical music for the truly initiated (Pasler 2009, 683).
This ideological split was encapsulated in Lawrence Levine’s classic text Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), and independently reinforced in Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of the cultural capital flowing from the education and good taste associated with classical music (Bourdieu [1979] 1984, 13–18, 272–273). But more recently, scholars have offered a more nuanced view of the social and aesthetic implications of this dichotomy (Locke 1993; Weber 2008a; Pasler 2009; Spitzer 2012, 367–371)—one acknowledging not only the multiple layers of the “middle class” but also the dangers of simplistically matching social class with levels of musical taste, and of imposing a narrative of social control over an acceptance of genuine aesthetic enjoyment. Certainly music of different origins jostled within a wide diversity of milieus, acquiring multiple new meanings according to context.
One way in which boundaries continued to be broken down after 1850 lay in an acceleration of top-down interventions—explicit assertions of the beneficial social and moral effects of “high-class” music (sometimes mingled with nationalistic overtones). In France, the centralized state characteristically supported symphonic concerts in an effort both to reach a wider populace and to encourage French composition. Thus the otherwise commercial concerts of Colonne were financed as an explicit counterbalance to the songs of the essentially lower-middle-class café-concerts, castigated as “aberrations of national taste” (Pasler 2009, 294). It was a paternalistic agenda in which the arts were administered as a public service in a “personification of the patrie” (268). In Britain, such support was enacted at local levels rather than nationally. Symphony concerts at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens led to the establishment of a year-round Municipal Orchestra in 1896, while in Yorkshire the left-wing Bradford council founded a “permanent orchestra” in 1892 specifically to provide concerts for working people.
Elsewhere, philanthropic initiatives provided similar services, and (in contrast to the male preference for conspicuous building projects) it was often women who took the initiative. A striking example is provided by the “good music for the less rich, for the poor” promoted by wealthy Brooklyn ladies in New York’s Brighton Beach, conducted from 1894 by the celebrated Wagnerian, Anton Seidl (1850–1898) (Horowitz 2005, 159–161). Still more practically, Viscountess Folkestone took her own, all-female, orchestra to the working-class districts of East London, offering concerts at the appropriately named People’s Palace and similar venues.
Serious music could even be packaged for wider audiences purely for its commercial potential. The London piano maker and publisher Chappell promoted a long-running series of Popular Concerts catering to the “shilling public,” featuring highbrow chamber music played by Joachim, Clara Schumann, and their circle. In Vienna, the economically attractive chamber format was also preferred, as with the founding of the Erstes Wiener Volksquartett für Classische Musik in 1890. Building on a resurgent liberal agenda to elevate through culture and education, such concerts were advocated equally by socialists and by a right-wing seeking to counteract them (Notley 2007, 152–153). Subsequent Volksconcerte were on a grander scale, but the repertoire was equally uncompromising: in 1892, Bruckner’s Third Symphony was performed in characteristically relaxed surroundings (“with beer and sausages”), but the audience “literally held its breath in order not to miss a single note” (155).
Another way to extend public access was through eclectic programming. For some this had always been an ideological concern—recall François-Joseph Fétis’s utopian model, influenced by the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), of music and (by extension) programming as “balanced, clear, and accessible, its creators serving their audience” by ranging across musical styles (Ellis 1995, 238). This concept of the “music of society” could lead in many different directions, but certainly up to the middle of the century mixed programming was the norm outside the most hallowed orchestral societies. Thus the entrepreneurial Berlin conductor Joseph Gungl (1809–1889) offered an ordered progression from overtures and symphonies to light music for a middle class unshackled by the conventions attached to conservative Berlin court programs (Mahling 1980, 101–102). Jullien was less schematic, but he undoubtedly diversified his programs for varied audiences, adroitly including single movements from the classics as publicity for his agenda to improve public taste. The Germania orchestra explicitly copied Jullien in their mixed programs for American audiences; it is striking that an attempt at purely classical programs had to be abandoned before the first concert in January 1854 (Newman 2010, 147–148).
Later in the century, a middle ground of promenade and gardens concerts continued to mix dances and potpourris with classical overtures and symphony movements—from the touring orchestras of Theodore Thomas and Benjamin Bilse (forerunner of the Berlin Philharmonic) to professional women’s ensembles such as the Vienna Ladies Orchestra. Whether such eclectic program-planning merely sought widespread appeal or actually reflected the “improving” taste of a middlebrow bourgeoisie is impossible to judge. But certainly the concept could extend beyond all reasonable expectation, as at the Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts, where Henry Wood transformed the Jullien tradition into a beacon of experimentalism, culminating in the premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces in 1912.
At the same time, voices were raised against the cultural earnestness expressed in the continuing mantra “to make good music popular” (Thomas 1905, 1:127). The elevation of the symphony orchestra, with its attendant aura of elitist exclusivity and conspicuous expense, came in for the same abuse as had Italian opera in the eighteenth century. Typical of the objections of the “honest citizen” was the reaction to the first Sunday matinée at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1888, contrasting its “contagious unsociability and stiffness” with the former convivial smoking, eating, and casual conversation during Sunday concerts (Cressman 2016, 14–15). More strident were expressions of left-wing opposition. Even in the United States, concerns were aired as early as 1840 that the elitism of European orchestral culture was intrinsically incompatible with democratic American society (Broyles 1992, 211–212). In Europe, a socialist espousal of the simple vocal music of real life (the Utopian vision of the Saint-Simonian movement) extended to outright opposition to symphonic music; thus, writing in the revolutionary 1840s, Theodor Hagen’s manifesto for working-class music excluded aesthetic art music altogether (Garratt 2010, 79). In such a radical view of a democratized music—a move that most professional musicians themselves resisted—the state was urged to take music out of the concert hall and into people’s festivals instead (134). German working-class music-making was already leaning toward a more communal mission, robustly rejecting any aspiration to the higher realms of German idealism. There was indeed another path.
If, for some, professional symphony orchestras represented the zenith of cultural excellence, for others amateur music-making (and choral singing in particular) represented a worthier aspiration. Public performance itself was often a secondary consideration; nevertheless, concert series evolved around amateur choirs for many different reasons. For example, the Boston Handel and Haydn Society conflated several church choirs to enjoy large-scale oratorios in secular surroundings, expanding in 1839 into the new Melodeon hall for some twenty public concerts a year. But it was in Germany that singing took on a truly central role, both in individual self-realization (Bildung) and in the cultivation of a sense of community and national German culture.
Choral music here took two contrasting directions. Berlin’s Singakademie, founded by Carl Fasch in 1791 for the mixed amateur sharing of sacred repertoires, provided the inspiration for German choral societies throughout the nineteenth century (not least through its contribution to Mendelssohn’s pivotal 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion). A potent symbol of nation-building resided in their regional festivals, held over two or three days: “a community of participants united in their devotion to the aesthetic, a microcosm of what an imagined Germany might be,” a cultural “state in miniature” that brought together vast choirs and still vaster audiences, always culminating in the sociability of a banquet (Bonds 2006, 94). At first, such gatherings formed a practical popular counterculture, with a veiled political undercurrent at a time when such public association was frowned upon. But as organizations such as the Lower Rhine Festival developed into major sites of new German oratorio, cantata, and symphony, with increasingly professional orchestras and high-profile soloists, paternalistic bourgeois values threatened to overwhelm the earlier grass-roots ethos (Garratt 2010, 84–89).
The second strand of German singing culture was purely secular in origin. The male-choir movement stemmed from Carl Friedrich Zelter’s exclusive Liedertafel in Berlin (1808) and from the Swiss publisher Nägeli’s pedagogical drive toward convivial choral singing for the masses. Out of the latter developed the Liederkranz movement that spread from Stuttgart across southern Germany; leading in turn in the 1840s to mass male-choir festivals (Sängerfeste) that projected a strongly nationalistic character (Garratt 2010, 117–122; Eichner 2012, 181–197).
In England and France, too, there were both political and religious connotations to developments in choral music. British choral societies were irrevocably tied to the revered Handel oratorio concert tradition, but they also functioned as a source of political dissent (Weber [1975] 2004, 117). One striking example was the Sacred Harmonic Society, founded in 1832 from an alliance of nonconformist chapels, in clear contradistinction to the aristocratic Anglicanism of the Concert of Antient Music. Again, the need for formal musical education was obviated, and contemporary publications—especially with simplified notations such as Curwen’s Tonic Sol-fa—encouraged amateur participation still further. More publicly, provincial festivals (deriving from cathedral city precedents) were now extended to increasingly massive community choral societies, enabling emergent industrial cities to celebrate their cultural sophistication and national importance. Thus when the Birmingham Festival commissioned Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846), in one stroke they reconciled conflicting Protestant factions and dispelled charges of middle-class philistinism (Pieper 2008, 97). Even Catholic works (Gounod’s Redemption, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius) were welcomed in Birmingham’s opulent Town Hall, its grandeur and aura reflecting exactly the same bourgeois values of moral rectitude and cultural self-assurance as were exemplified in Germany.
In France, choral singing took a quite different path. A similar association with the political upheavals of 1830s led to the intervention of the state and support for William Wilhem’s male choirs (Orphéons), singing unsophisticated a cappella music (Weber [1975] 2004, 122). It was not until the turbulent years around 1870 that French choral societies accepted Handel as an idealized republican, inspired by a utopian view of English festivals that not only blurred social class distinctions but also admitted women into mixed choirs (Ellis 2005, 221–234).
Just as the concert series became visibly fixed in concert halls, so it became established in time: in musical calendars spanning decades, in institutional histories, in program notes offering a constant ordering of performance chronology. Historical self-awareness was exemplified by Eduard Hanslick’s book on Viennese concert life, the first volume a thoroughly researched history, the second a practical disquisition on contemporary musical taste derived from his own reviews—a “living history” (Karnes 2008, 56–65). The history of performance itself thus became a part of the very process of canonization. One direction was toward neoclassicism, as established orchestras took on the mantle of guardians of conservative taste; and nowhere more than in Mendelssohn’s Leipzig, where “Historic Concerts” deliberately mapped out different musical periods (Pieper 2008, 92–93; Sposato 2018, 257–259). But these fell broadly within established norms: early and new music concerts represented alternative cultures, as they still do today.
Concerts devoted explicitly to older music reflected a range of ideological constructs—aesthetic, social, and national. Thus London’s Concert of Antient Music, founded in 1776 to celebrate Renaissance and Baroque music, survived until 1848 as a beacon of aristocratic stability and national heritage. But when the British early-music movement, resurrected by Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), began to explore unknown seventeenth-century music on original instruments, it projected an underground culture linked to William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, evoking a socialist, pre-industrial idyll. In France, early-music concerts were pioneered by Fétis, whose concerts historiques from 1832 mixed genuine early music with fake imitations. But the latter intrusion scarcely mattered; the enthusiasm of Berlioz reminds us that such concerts attracted interest as much for their novelty as for their historicism. As in Britain, the social and political associations of early music were diverse, spanning both monarchist and republican causes within a broad nationalist agenda (Pasler 2009, 217). Thus, while there was an aristocratic aspect to the concerts of the Prince de la Moskova (1843–46) and Vincent d’Indy’s much later Schola Cantorum, for the French musicologist Alexandre-Étienne Choron, early music transcended class, a repertory to be “adopted nationwide for the good of the French citizenry” (Ellis 2005, 29).
If there was concern that early music might be displacing living composers, a counterbalance was supplied in new-music concerts. From 1832 to 1842, Berlioz risked much on numerous Paris concerts featuring his own music, while in 1852, Liszt promoted a “Berlioz Week” at the Weimar court, followed by another three years later. For Wagner, too, concerts of opera extracts were a prime means of extending his reputation; according to an enraptured Baudelaire, his 1860 Paris concerts represented “une de ces solennelles crises de l’art” that controversially transformed the entire concert experience (Baudelaire 1861, 7–8). The New German School, meanwhile, was enshrined in the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein (founded by Liszt and Brendel in 1861), showcasing contemporary German composers at a near-annual Tonkünstler-Versammlung, and later extending to Russian music and to a rising firebrand in Richard Strauss.
Elsewhere, a quite different approach resided in overt appeals to national sentiment, whether politically inspired or simply resistant to the Austro-German hegemony. London’s Society of British Musicians, for example, brought together disaffected composers ignored by the Philharmonic Society. In Italy, the publisher Ricordi sponsored concerts for contemporary Italian symphonists (Antolini 2008, 225–227), while the Russian Symphony Concerts, supported by a wealthy timber merchant, provided a platform for Rimsky-Korsakov and his pupils. By contrast, American music featured strongly in major public festivals, as at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and in conventions staged by the Music Teachers’ National Association (Nelson-Strauss 2012, 402–411).
But the notion of a revived national culture was most strongly articulated in France, accelerated by the catastrophic events of 1870–71. Colonne began in 1873 with eight Concerts Nationals, at first subsidized by a publisher and later by the government, to enable new music to be programmed. Although French composers were strongly supported by aristocratic patrons (Chimènes 2004), such developments were unmistakably allied with Republican values, as at a magnificent government festival of new French music held in 1878–79 at the vast new Hippodrome (Pasler 2009, 305). But the most conspicuous example of commitment to progressive new music as a national emblem remains the French Société Nationale de Musique, founded in 1871 “to aid the production and popularization of all serious musical works, published or unpublished, by French composers.” The ideological basis for the Société rested on a complex set of social and political attitudes, but its central constituency consisted of wealthy intellectuals determined to revive French culture after the frivolity and materialism of the failed Second Empire. Musically, however, many of its founders (d’Indy, in particular) looked to the noble ideals and elevated aspirations of German music, especially Wagner, as the inspiration for serious French music of the future (Strasser 2001; see also Duchesneau 1997, Fulcher 1999).
A striking feature of French musical life was the juxtaposition of new music with repertoires from the ancien regime (Ellis 2005, 244; Pasler 2009, 217–229, 629–641). Thus, at a series of Concerts de l’Opéra in 1895–96, premieres by French composers were set side by side with danses anciennes by Lully and Rameau, deliberately highlighting their modern relationship to the past. A similar spirit of validation through comparison obtained in wide-ranging international invitations to the Paris Exhibitions, while new French orchestral music was actively promulgated as a form of cultural diplomacy, as when both the Lamoureux and Colonne orchestras traveled to London in 1896. However, as new music became closely identified with a much wider artistic and literary culture, contemporary music concerts took on a very different tone. The chamber concerts of Brussels art critic Octave Maus (1856–1919) contributed to the avowedly avant-garde program of the Cercle des XX (1884–93, thereafter the Libre Esthétique). Modernism was recognized both as a resurgence of idealism and as a direct rebellion against the established bourgeois symphonic culture: New Music had arrived.
From the traditional view that the health of a city’s musical life can be measured by the size, refinement, or sophistication of its symphony concert audiences, a much more complex picture has begun to emerge. The diversity of music across a wider spectrum has been revealed in studies of different cities: Christoph-Helmut Mahling on Berlin (1980), Jann Pasler on Paris (2009), David Gramit on Edmonton in Canada (2016). Sometimes these studies disrupt comfortable narratives, as in Pasler’s discovery that during the 1890s French composers contributed significantly to programs at Paris’s zoo and outside the Bon Marché department store, a trend matching political imperatives of both Left and Right (Pasler 2009, 600).
Such alternative spaces and unexpected juxtapositions encourage wider perspectives on nineteenth-century concert life: embracing café-concerts and ballad concerts; blackface minstrels and music halls; military and colliery bands; German and American beer gardens; French kiosques and English pleasure gardens; organ recitals and amateur mechanics’ institutes. There is admittedly a danger of drifting into languid postures of approval here—as, for example, where such milieus unexpectedly encouraged the classics (the sophisticated band arrangements of Wagner) or promulgated new music (the avant-garde of Montmartre cabaret). Instead, we should surely begin by acknowledging the diversity and crossover of repertoires, avoiding casual preconceptions or a rush to judgment.
Mainstream concerts in the nineteenth century do present an obvious target. Whatever the initial utopian aspirations for a universal public music, the outcome was an elite culture available only to select professionals and well-heeled audiences, reinforced by the rituals of silent listening and seemly etiquette. It may be arguable whether government subsidy and well-meaning philanthropy embodied a direct social control, diverting or neutralizing class unrest. But certainly the cultural capital and prestige attached to high-art concerts resulted in clear social differentiation, an expression of power reflecting everything from class and colonialism to race and gender. Though there are striking departures (Clara Schumann’s role in the new recital repertoire, the influence of society ladies on taste in New York or Paris), white European men assuredly exerted the strongest cultural leadership, whether as composers or performers, promoters or patrons.
In a still bleaker view, the cultural and experiential authenticity of bourgeois concert culture itself has been thrown into doubt. Already in 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the conservatism and complacency of bourgeois taste, claiming that its rooted historicism inhibited spontaneity and progress—modern culture was “not real culture at all, but only a kind of knowledge about culture” (Pieper 2008, 125). Richard Leppert, extending Adorno’s notion of a manipulative Culture Industry, has suggested that “public music under the conditions of modernity was less a manifestation of sociality than a simulacrum of a lost but imagined one” (Leppert 2002, 483). For Richard Sennett, the silence that spread across concert halls during the nineteenth century signaled a profound self-doubt: the anxiety of the audience member longing to appear cultivated, an isolated spectator forlornly observing the magicians lauded for displaying emotions on stage (Sennett [1977] 2002, 205–211, 199, 261).
But it is perhaps too facile to mock and to mourn. Musicology has begun to appreciate more subtly how people actually experience music—including a revaluation of sacralization that recognizes that, while concert decorum is certainly exclusionary, it does reflect a genuine and widespread yearning for a more intense aesthetic experience. When in Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster depicts the clerk Leonard Bast, prepared to feel uncomfortably out of place at a symphony orchestra concert yet determined to taste the emotional well of Beethoven and Elgar, the aspiration is tenderly, not unkindly, drawn. It is impossible to penetrate the motivations of the hundreds, sometime thousands, who attended concert series of many kinds, in concert halls and parks, in churches and aquaria, in department stores and beer gardens, sampling the most diversely mixed repertoires. We should clearly interpret accounts of their rapt attention with due caution. But neither should we assume that our analysis of multiple musical contexts and meanings is incompatible with the emotional and intellectual experiences that concert audiences of wide social and cultural backgrounds enjoyed across the nineteenth century.