Since about twenty years ago, the term classical music has gradually been replaced by canon as the main concept for analyzing the roles played by old works in performing repertories. Because classical music was identified with a specific repertory—Austro-German works from Haydn through Brahms—scholars began speaking of adopting the conceptually more fertile term canon as a cultural reference point. Discussion of the concept by literary scholars has opened the way for productive discussion of the many different canons which have tended to endure in knowledge or performance. This concept nevertheless poses its own problems, since frequent citation of The Canon has seemed to refer only to music of Austro-German origin, thereby resisting equivalent discussion of either opera or popular music. The assumption of a single canon has frustrated awareness of the deep divisions which emerged among disparate regions of musical activity. This problem is particularly acute for thinking about the nineteenth century, since during this period Western musical culture split up into a set of worlds which went into significantly different directions: orchestral and chamber music; opera repertories of contrasting genres; and popular songs of many kinds performed in clubs and public concerts.
This chapter aims to examine the intellectual process by which musical canons expanded in scale and in number during the nineteenth century, dividing musical culture in ways still in existence today. It will first identify the conceptual tools which can aid us in understanding how canons evolved in musical culture, touching base with thinking coming from various directions. In the process a new concept will be suggested, that during a composer’s lifetime he or she might develop an incipient canonic reputation, even though it did not always last. After looking back briefly at canonic repertories of the eighteenth century, the chapter will compare canonic repertories in concerts and opera repertories during the nineteenth century. It will analyze how typically such programming spoke to different publics with contrasting values, though it will also show how crossovers did occur between separate canons. The chapter will end with a brief exploration of programming that mingled popular songs and orchestral pieces which commanded a wide public.
Much has been written about how major artistic movements—most prominently Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism—interrelated with musical culture in the course of the nineteenth century, chiefly through common links in literature and philosophy. Yet it is vital also to examine the cultural politics which surrounded musical institutions and the larger community in the formation of canonic repertories, a context within which the general currents of what is defined as intellectual history did not necessarily play central roles. Just when and why pieces or repertories remained in use cannot easily be explained through the channels of intellectual history, a history which has tended to explain longevity through the assumption of greatness seen in discourse about major ideas or works of art. Explaining the social and cultural framework within which canons emerged can clarify the ways in which intellectual aspects developed within the larger contexts of cultural life. It is important to define how musical canons played major roles in strikingly different ways within concerts, opera, and the early tendencies toward popular music.
By long tradition, playing old works tended to go against the assumption that musical style and taste would change ineluctably. The process by which musical works did or did not remain in use requires investigation of institutional and cultural frameworks which determined the processes by which certain composers or compositions either ceased to be performed or managed to remain in use, in some cases for an unusually long time. A major factor affecting this process and its major alternatives was the deep-rooted assumption found in musical culture of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century that public taste would change drastically and ineluctably at certain points in time. We shall indeed see how the opera world evolved in close relationship to the appearance, success, but then disappearance of canonic repertories. In France, a linguistic phrase identified this process as les progrès de la musique, best translated as “the natural evolution of musical taste.” For example, in 1801 the bi-monthly Journal des dames des modes suggested that people assumed that the court of the Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was “always favorable toward les progrès de la musique” (Journal des dames des modes, May 20, 1801, p. 410). We shall see that this cultural assumption basically disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century in concerts and opera, but not as much in popular songs.
It is vital to recognize that the world of opera went in a quite different direction in regard to canons during the nineteenth century compared with the concert world. By tradition, the intellectual framework of the opera world tended against such self-examination, since it would define itself instead through the grandeur of the theatrical context where it was performed. Indeed, the operas of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti were gradually reshaped in canonic terms quite different from what was happening in the values for classical music in concert life. The great diversity of opera genres, especially the contrast between spoken and all-sung text, makes conceptual generalization about opera canon difficult. That opera served so broad a public in the nineteenth century made any claim to a higher intellectual tradition unnecessary. The significance of operas which survived a long time spoke for itself. Even though Richard Wagner tried to define himself through the canonic reputation of Ludwig van Beethoven, such thinking related more to his sense of canonic greatness in the opera (Stollberg 2013).
By contrast, scholarly work on areas of popular music and jazz has developed largely independent of what is done on opera and the traditional areas of concert life. So much cultural distance developed among these musical cultures that the term classical does not seem problematic to most scholars, and that the terms classical rock and jazz classics have become common currency (Jones 2008) In what follows we will discuss how old songs remained in use during the nineteenth century at British music halls, French café-concerts, or German events called Variété, which became central to urban culture in the second half of the century. The old repertories came primarily from the best-known operas, in part because some singers moved back and forth between such events, influencing what was going on in reciprocal fashion. Songs rooted in the traditions of such locales continued in their own right, and we will see how a few pieces lasted from the 1850s into the twentieth century.
Whereas self-conscious identification of canonic works dates back to antiquity in the literature or the fine arts, it did not evolve in musical culture until the canonization of a few composers of sacred works in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not only did that process not continue significantly after that but also secular music was much slower in developing canons. Indeed, there existed no literary vehicles for writing empirically or critically about music or musical life such as were central to the worlds of literature, painting, or the spoken theater. By tradition, writings on music either had been technical in nature or were confined to philosophical discourse unrelated to actual music or its critique. The breakthrough in moving beyond this situation came in the early eighteenth century, when old works began appearing in public quickly and significantly: the Academy of Ancient Music in London (1726) and the retention of Lully’s operas in Paris, along with works by composers who followed him.
Not that much was written about these composers for some time, but it is useful to consult the writings of art historian Aby Warburg for a means by which to understand how music could last a significant length of time without written commentary. Warburg rebelled against the conventions by which art historians exaggerated the high intellectual reputations which evolved around painters or sculptors, taking for granted that people seeing them in earlier periods conjured up intellectually defined, literary-based canonic notions such as are assumed today. He argued for more neutral terms and for more anthropological concepts for identifying the perception and the honoring of old works where literary vehicles were limited, perhaps nonexistent. As his interpreter Georges Didi-Hubermann argued, “the term Nachleben refers to the survival (the continuity or afterlife and metamorphosis) of images and motifs—as opposed to their renascence after extinction or, conversely, their replacement by innovations in image and motif.” (Didi-Huberman 2003).
A parallel breakthrough in defining canonic recognition within new areas of culture was contributed in What Is a Classic (1944) by T. S. Eliot. He pointed out that particular canons emerged in the less prestigious areas of literary life, meaning that the term classic can take “several meanings in several contexts,” from Virgil’s poetry to the “‘standard author’ in any language,” including particularly The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s, arguably a classic of schoolboy fiction. Thus taking a sociological and an aesthetic approach to the question, Eliot essentially advocated accepting the existence of multiple canons in a broad cultural universe. Still, the noun canon can seem to imply a high intellectual authority such as was not yet practiced regarding pieces of music around 1800—indeed, that very term can imply an intellectual recognition not yet applied to highly respected old works. That is why it is wise to speak of canonic vocabulary or canonic practices in regard to treatment of a piece of music. The evolution of multiple canons occurred to the greatest extent in the opera world, since there were so many different genres in the nineteenth century: opera seria, opera buffa, grand opéra, opéra comique, operetta, and Wagnerian opera. That is why it is necessary always to define a canon within a particular musical world—for example, the canon of nineteenth-century Lieder, the main works in grand opéra, or songs made popular in British music halls.
Frank Kermode pointed out how modern canons overcame the traditional high status of ancient works and thus opened the way for musical culture to recognize canons significantly. In The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, Kermode argued that literary recognition of regionally native languages challenged traditional classicism, thereby establishing “a secularized, a demythologized imperialism; or, as Eliot would say, … a relative, not an absolute classic.” As a result, he concluded that “neoclassicism succeeds imperialism”—or rather, it is “a second-order classicism.” In the process, the canonic authority of ancient literature became significantly weakened, opening the way for strong new canons to emerge for works in native languages and in the other arts. Kermode’s construction of this issue makes it possible for music historians to see that, likewise, during the eighteenth century canons of sacred music and secular drama were able to establish intellectually significant bases of new kinds. By implication, the plays of Shakespeare and Corneille and the choral-orchestral works of Purcell and Handel took on such a status in this context. The expanding significance of public opinion in major cities played a role in this process, as Kermode shows, aiding Handel in his early career in England (Kermode 2004, 23). I have argued that the changes Kermode disclosed helped stimulate early literary commentaries on music separate from philosophical or scientific theory. Thus around 1700, English writers began to identify pieces by sixteenth-century composers as ancient music, thereby making a major expansion of the intellectual framework of musical culture (Weber 1992, 1994, and 1999; Eggington 2014).
Once we find ourselves in a period when there existed self-conscious identification of musical canons, it is best to turn to the thinking of Hans Robert Jauss, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception ([1967] 1982). Admired for bringing historical study and literary criticism onto a common ground, Jauss argues that a horizon of expectations emerges around works directly in reference to previous expectation and criticism which reshapes essential aspects of that field. Central to his argument is that the historian must pay close attention to the roles played by the tendency of the reading public to remain conscious of past expectations, but then to alter them when confronted by challenging new works. Jauss argued that such a process tends to proceed “from simple reception to critical understanding, from passive to active reception, from recognized aesthetic norms to a new production that surpasses them (Jauss [967] 1982, 19). By his argument, readers develop a set of expectations within a long-term understanding as they engage with new works potentially rivaling past ones: “[t]he new text evokes for the reader [or listener] the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced” (23). We can see how variously in concerts and the opera world the public began discovering major new horizons: in the former cases, the symphonies and string quartets of W. A. Mozart and Beethoven and in the latter, the works of Rossini, Wagner, Offenbach, and Puccini.
Jauss’s analysis applies chiefly to the initial process by which a writer or a composer first establishes a canonic reputation. I suggest that we extend this argument by seeing that such a reputation survives on an incipient canonic reputation until the death of that figure or possibly even somewhat after that time. As the public develops new expectations for the music of a composer and for a set of works, tension can develop between vision of what is expected and problematic aspects brought by changing opinions and competing figures. To be sure, such a reputation may be challenged at a later time due to the impact of cultural or social change, though that process can bring a renewal of canonic respect. In such a fashion we can see how a factor of uncertainty was common in the evolution of canonic reputations. In a few cases a composer achieved a high incipient reputation which was eliminated by outright disillusionment in the public or among critics. That happened most of all to Louis Spohr after about 1840, and Flora Wilson has argued for the effective de-canonization of Giacomo Meyerbeer soon after his death in 1864. Even though pieces by such composers were still performed fairly often—Spohr’s concert works and his opera Jessonda remained in use, as did Meyerbeer’s works at the Paris Opéra through the 1930s—their reputations had sunk below what had been believed (Brown 1984, Wilson 2020).
Interestingly enough, the case of Joseph Haydn illustrates how an incipient canonic reputation could decline in later generations. Haydn drew special acclaim in Paris and London, climaxing in his visits to England in 1791–92 and 1794–95, where he wrote songs and the later symphonies. But after his death in 1807 it was said that he never rivaled Beethoven; indeed, as Leon Botstein has argued, Haydn’s music became known as “entertaining but emotionally distant, if not irrelevant.” But recently James Garrett questioned how far that tendency really went by showing that certain areas of Haydn’s oeuvre—the quartets particularly—were widely admired throughout the nineteenth century (Botstein 1998, Garrett 2003).
Problematic aspects can also be seen in the incipient canonic reputations of other major composers. Whereas Beethoven obtained a remarkably high reputation by 1815, his late works were for the most part not performed often or appreciated by the general public until the notion of a “late style” emerged as a formidable interpretive vehicle. Johannes Brahms faced the decline in demand for new music at the start of his career, and his reputation was complicated significantly by the controversy with the Wagnerian movement, until his songs, chamber works, and widely performed German Requiem established him on a firm plane in most of Europe (MacDonald 1990). Richard Strauss faced an ideologically hostile music scene but actually benefited from controversial treatment of his operas. Significantly enough, his chamber works were performed unusually often along with those of Mozart and Beethoven, a compliment given to few other living composers in Germany around 1910 (Weber 2015). Incipient success early in a career likewise can be seen with Hector Berlioz and Camille Saint-Saëns. Even though Berlioz had an unusual reputation as a maverick composer, and indeed lived chiefly from journalism, he ended up with a strong incipient reputation thanks to a carefully planned set of concert tours (1842–48) and getting Les Troyens onto the stage (1863). By contrast, Camille Saint-Saëns established himself at an early age, writing his most famous works by age forty (Samson et Delilah and the Second Piano Concerto), but ended up as an embittered reactionary as music critic.
The fragmentation of musical culture originated in large part with the publication of popular opera tunes on a scale rarely before achieved. By 1830, sale of the best-known opera melodies was dominating public taste, influencing instrumentalists to focus their repertories on fantaisies upon those tunes, thereby alarming the more serious musicians and listeners and influencing them to focus their attention more narrowly upon works deemed canonic. Benefit concerts became even more comprehensively focused on famous opera numbers and virtuoso pieces based on them, stimulating acute criticism for spreading bad musical taste. Thus did a major division break out within the musical world, as orchestras and string quartets narrowed their repertories to a large extent to works deemed canonic. As early as the 1810s, string quartets in Paris and Vienna began to put on concerts with no vocal numbers or even in some cases no piano. Note, however, that almost all major orchestras could survive because their players made their living in the pits of the opera houses. At the same time, there arose informal concerts in bars which gradually expanded into big, highly commercial events called variously café-concerts in France, music halls in Britain, or Variété theaters in Germany and Austria. Such events inaugurated what eventually was called popular music in various linguistic categories. All of this brought into question the locus and nature of authority over musical taste and institutions. The old order of musical life accordingly entered into crisis, and the traditionally tightly bound musical world began to fragment into separate social and cultural spheres. After the upheaval of 1848–49, a new musical order came into place based on their relative independence of different kinds of music (Weber 2008).
Yet the worlds of musical taste we are discussing did not evolve in entirely separate terms. Let us imagine in theoretical terms how separate fields of musical activity can interact and change: such interaction—say, by a concert with an opera house or the latter with a show palace—would not be legitimated by musical culture as a whole, since the interaction would come about through their mutual functioning alone. In such a fashion can social fields interact independently and thereby change in particular respects. This process should be seen as taking place within a three-dimensional universe where separate spheres behave as amoeba-like bodies, borrowing musical aspects and changing in the process (Weber 2018). In such a fashion did negotiation go on between opera and orchestral music, even when there existed hostile taste groups in the two spheres who regarded one another with suspicion.
An example of this can be seen in the process by which the popular violinists Henry Vieuxtemps and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst adapted the fantaisie such as originated in flashy benefit concerts to seem proper in the more demure world of classical-music concerts—an interaction which went on right up to the twentieth century. Once a particular genre shifted from one context to the other, the interpretation of the music changed in meaning and social function. For example, the middle movements from Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony were sometimes performed in promenade concerts, where drinks were served for people who could walk around. The idealistic principles undergirding classical-music concerts might put off some listeners from such interaction: in 1846, a Viennese journalist derided the “missionaries of the classics” whom he saw trying to make benefit concerts play more classics, against that public’s wishes (Der Wandererer [Vienna], March 21, 1846, p. 275).
I have defined as musical idealism the notion that musical culture should aim toward an aesthetically high level (Weber 1984, 2008). This code of values and behaviors emerged within the destabilized condition of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a time when new codes of conduct were emerging in a variety of areas. An ambitious agenda of change was posed by the movement, whose principles became the foundation of canonic repertories in concerts by orchestras, string quartets, and unusually series singers and instrumentalists (Weber 1984). A common agenda emerged whose principles can be summarized as follows:
Commentators identified specifically the practices they saw as offensive to serious musical taste:
The key literary context in which the new musical canons arose was daily journalistic commentary. Even though journalists did not perforce create canons, their views provided the medium within which musical values were encountered and then weighed by the public, thereby influencing those governing musical institutions. Most important of all, critics played a central role in musical culture since their work demanded that they deal with both benefit concerts and more serious events, whose worlds tended to have less and less to do with one another. Though some critics became identified with one or the other of the competing musical values, many of them balanced their point of view in different contexts. Writers translated these issues into code words to which readers became sensitive: attacking fashion, mode, or miscellany while promoting practices thought classical, serious, or high-class. The Berlin journalist A. B. Marx pushed the philosophical and polemical aspects of musical idealism as far as it might go, employing vocabulary from the second generation of Romantic thinking:
The vital question for our art and its influence on the morality and the view of the people is simply this: whether its spiritual or its sensuous side is to prevail; whether it is to purity and refresh heart and soul through its inherent spiritual power … —or whether, void of that holy power, it is to weaken and enervate spirit and disposition, burying them in the billows of a narcotic sensuousness and thoughtlessness that dissolves and destroys all that is upright and noble. (Marx 1997, 18)
Though this movement evolved Europe-wide, it showed contrasting tendencies in different places. Some cities were slower to take to the new taste; in Frankfurt, for example, the concerts held at the city’s art museum continued to be focused on opera selections until about 1850. Arguably, the largest public for classical music developed in Paris, where the first regular chamber music concerts began in 1814 and four different orchestral series were active from the 1870s. Chamber music developed with particular strength in London, where programs including serious songs were offered regularly at low prices from 1835, and the Beethoven Quartet Society explored the repertory to an unusual depth. In most major cities there developed a second orchestral series whose prices were affordable by the middle classes. But in Vienna, interestingly enough, that did not happen until the turn of the twentieth century, in part due to resistance from the august Philharmonic Concerts. Organizations similar to those in Paris and London developed in New York and Boston, along with popular promenade concerts which offered some classical works. Such concerts did not come about in Italy until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
These events need to be seen in the context from which the movement of musical idealist values emerged among self-consciously serious musicians, amateurs, and commentators. Idealistic musical thinking arose more in journalistic than in philosophical writing in the burgeoning of periodicals during that period. The movement arose as a reaction to the growing commercialization of opera and certain areas of concert life; its proponents often attacked grand opéra and instrumental virtuosity for generating a crude, massified form of musical taste. Arguably, this point of view was to some extent influenced by the diverse utopian cults of the time, since idealistic critics such as Hector Berlioz called for musical culture to be based instead on a “higher” and more learned culture rooted in knowledge of great works from the past.
The hot-button words of musical idealism amounted to some extent to a critique of modernity, as was the case in Romanticism generally (Lőwy and Sayre 2001). David Gramit has analyzed German thinking in this regard in detail, describing the effort to define what was proper to music and to the concert on a high plane (Gramit 2001). Central to the German context was the precipitous decline in privileged positions in courts and churches, a trend that made musicians fearful that public taste would lose its intellectual moorings and be manipulated by purely commercial motives. Would good music survive if piano teachers kept feeding their student’s banal arrangements of what was called “folk” melodies? While essayists had raised the specter of moral decline in musical taste since the early eighteenth century, a new trope arose calling specifically for unworthy genres to be expelled from concerts—dance music, the variation, and the potpourri most of all. Reviewers began sketching out a hierarchy among genres, from the potpourri at one end to the symphony and the quartet at the other. Still, as Gramit points out, a systematic hierarchy never emerged, since too many ambiguities and disagreements arose about pieces found in-between for agreement to be reached (Gramit 2001). The seemingly harsh criticism of Eduard Hanslick has in the process been reevaluated in a positive light, in large part because it grew out of the high principles of musical idealism (Gooley 2011, Grimes 2013).
The influence of musical idealism sprang up throughout Western and Central Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, though after that in Italy. While German and Austrian periodicals figured centrally in the early history of the movement, leadership arose at much the same time with equal strength in England and France. Indeed, the eighteenth- century repertories of ancient music—old operas and motets in France and the oratorios of Handel in Britain—served as both repertory and aesthetic precedence for the notion of classical music (Weber 1992). The vision of a higher order of musical taste, rooted in concerts for orchestras and string quartets, radiated from the major musical cities, reshaping musical life in Eastern Europe and North America, in small towns as much as in big ones. Cities such as Manchester, Boston, Rouen, Brussels, and Frankfurt ended up influencing the musical life in the national capitals significantly.
Let us look at a pair of concert programs which typify the purest efforts to perform repertory thought to be classical music. Public concerts by string quartets were begun in Vienna by Ignaz Schuppanzigh in 1804 and in Paris by Pierre Baillot in 1814, from which grew a specialized new kind of music-making that banned vocal pieces and for some time even use of a piano (Gingerich 2010) A program from 1834 (table 15.1) illustrates how far Baillot went from the conventional mixed program, save for the variations on a familiar air which he played at the end.
Table 15.1 “Séances Baillot,” March 22, 1834, 76th Meeting
| Quintet, Op. 25, no. 1, G. 295 | Boccherini |
| Quartet, n. 72, Op. 71, n. 3 | Haydn |
| Quintet no. 4, sol m. | Mozart |
| Quintet no. 5, Op. 104 | Beethoven |
| “Air de la Famille suisse,” varied, Op 28 | Baillot |
Music societies offering orchestral concerts emerged as another important institutional basis for the idealistic agenda by justifying their high purposes in focusing programs on the works seen as the greatest in stature. For example, in Leipzig the subscription concerts at the Leipzig Gewandhaus had always opened with a symphony, but in 1807 it broke from long tradition by performing Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony as the only work after intermission, giving such a work a new dignity. The Philharmonic Society of London (1813) and the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna (1814) set new principles for musical organizations; the by-laws of the Philharmonic Society banned opera selections and the virtuoso concerto, even though such music was played from the start. By the late 1820s a Viennese series called the Concert Spirituel (borrowing from the earlier Parisian series) established the first orchestral repertory to be focused on classical works and identified with a “high” aesthetic. Table 15.2 shows a program from that series given in 1833, offering canonic works save for two movements from a mass composed by Luigi Cherubini.
Table 15.2 Concert Spirituel, Vienna, University Festhalle, February 24, 1833
| Symphonie in D-dur, K. 297 (No. 31, Paris, 1778) | Mozart |
| Kantata, Opferlied, Op. 121b (1824) | Beethoven |
| Ouverture, Castor und Pollux (1787) | Abt Georg Vogler |
| Agnus dei & Dona nobis | Luigi Cherubini |
| Choral Fugue, Davide penitente, K. 469 (1785) | Mozart |
After the series closed in 1848, a group calling itself the Philharmoniker began giving occasional concerts and from 1861 gave a regular series each year. In Paris, the Society of Concerts of the Conservatoire began in 1828 but did not offer as consistent a classical repertory until the late 1830s. Parallel orchestras were set up in Boston in 1841 and in New York City in 1842 (Weber 2012).
A self-conscious intelligentsia emerged in the movement for musical idealism that has been central to musical culture since that time. By long tradition, writings on music had had a problematic relationship with those on literature, the former regarded as being either too technical or of lesser intellectual significance. That began to change when the various Parisian querelles about opera drew eager attention from men of letters, and when histories of music by John Hawkins and Charles Burney sold widely in Britain in 1776. The cult for Beethoven then led musical commentary to a higher level, influenced by Romantic thinking (Schrade 1942, Burnham 1995). As was suggested for periodicals, the idealistic viewpoint provided leverage for ambitious writers to stake a claim for music on a new intellectual plane. The growth of musical education among amateurs provided a basis from which these writers could claim that musical knowledge was necessary to appreciate the great works, and with that in mind, François Fétis published a book to teach people how to appreciate good music (Fétis 1836). In the process, classical music life separated itself more and more from the emerging world of popular songs and musical theater.
The fast-growing periodicals of the time served as the launching pad for an ideological agenda for reforming musical life. A whole host of major periodicals emerged in the 1830s and 1840s—the Revue musicale, the Musical Times, and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik most prominently—that had profound effects on musical life and spawned more specialized periodicals (Kalifa et al. 2012). Even though such magazines would usually remain open to a variety of tastes, a shift toward expressly serious values occurred in most of the leading publications by 1840 (Thomas-Hill 2013). At least one music magazine emerged in each major city that propounded the values of musical idealism to some extent, stimulating amateurs to read about music more regularly than seems to be the case today. Music criticism as such, different from news, polemics, or philosophical discussion, had appeared only occasionally in the eighteenth century, but it was coming to the fore as periodicals proliferated in the 1820s. A new kind of aggressive—some thought tyrannical—music critic became central to musical culture. Originally manifested by former Jesuit Julien-Louis Geoffroy in his feuilleton of the Journal de l’Empire (Ellis 2001), such writing was rooted in interpretation of canonic musical authority, produced most significantly by Fétis in Paris, A. B. Marx in Berlin, J. W. Davison in London, and Robert Schumann in Leipzig. These writers did not just report views of the public, as had been conventional in musical commentary until at least the 1780s. By presenting themselves as empowered critics, they asserted an authority to judge pieces, performers, and tastes that laid the basis for the authority claimed for musical classics and the principles of musical idealism as a whole.
It was still unusual for someone formally trained in music to serve as a journalistic critic, a tendency which led Fétis, in a piece just after he had published the Revue musicale in 1827, to demand that reviewers be expected to bring such education to the job:
Almost all books done in France on musical theater written are by literary men who are completely ignorant about music, and who just see music as an accessory to poetry. From that come musical heresies which have spread throughout our society but end up being considered as eternal truths, indeed proverbs. (Fétis 1827, 472)
Humor was as common as condemnation in musical rhetoric in that time. Hector Berlioz ridiculed the low level of taste he saw in the programs at benefit concerts, which he articulated in an article reprinted in Soirées de l’orchestre:
It’s so common to put on a concert made up of mediocre or just plain bad music; the program is packed with Italian cavatinas, fantaisies for solo piano, bits from several masses, concertos for several flutes, Lieder for solo trombone, duos for bassoon, and so forth. Conversations accordingly key break in the orchestra, several of whose members draw sketches idly on their music. (Berlioz 1854, 274–275)
Berlioz accordingly proposed that a community named Euphonia be founded where music would be composed and performed in ideal circumstances, following the famous motto of violinist Baillot: “It is not enough that the artist be prepared to confront the public; it is necessary that the public be ready to understand what it will hear” (Baillot 1834, 1).
The agenda of musical reform posed by idealists of the time—most of whose values we more or less take for granted today—led to harsh complaints against mixing light with serious genres, in some cases condemning Italian or French as a whole. Henry Chorley, critic of the London Athenaeum, articulated scorn for the public found at the opera and “miscellaneous” concerts: “A theatrical audience is of necessity miscellaneous—made up of intelligences of every order; and the conditions of triumph within its sphere necessarily embrace effect to a degree which would be a degrading concession in music appealing to a more severe and select audience” (Chorley, Athenaeum, January 18, 1847, p. 73). Nevertheless, Katherine Ellis has shown that supposedly “serious” concertgoers of this period—at the Conservatoire Concerts especially—still behaved rather like their predecessors of the previous century, coming in late or leaving early, talking to one another during the performance, though perhaps about the music (Ellis 2018). Arguably, social behavior at concerts did not change fundamentally until the twentieth century.
The influence of Romantic thinking can be seen in the language by which the idealistic point of view was expressed. In 1830, Berlioz declared that “romantic composers” had borrowed the phrase “free-wheeling inspiration” from Victor Hugo to characterize what they were doing (Berlioz 1830). The poet Leigh Hunt, known as a Romantic, reported that his friends doted on arias by Giovanni Pergolesi, Giovanni Paisiello, Mozart, or Gluck—Paisiello chiefly for showing “the passionate expression of despair” (Hunt 1964, 37). Romantic thinking was explained in more abstract, Hegelian terms by Karl Julius Becher, a Viennese critic who wrote that “conquering the external demands of playing is a means by which to manifest an inner spirit … that indicates true art!” (Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung, January 6, 1842, p. 11). Still, some reviewers stuck to a basic journalistic style which avoided either the personal or the philosophical implications we see in these quotes. Moreover, a recent study of the French controversy between Classical and Romantic ideas discloses shifting, often unclear allegiances, which did not relate to musical thinking very closely (Della Zazzera 2017).
Only recently have music historians begun to face the challenging question: How can the concept of canon be applied to the history of opera? The problem has had remarkably little consideration among scholars, despite all the recent discussion about canons in concert life. Did the separate regions of musical canon interact, or did they just go their separate ways? It is clear that the terms canon and canonic must be applied to opera in ways particular to that world, not derived from the ways of the classical music world. James Parakalis led the way in this direction, analyzing the values predominant in opera life since the early twentieth century, indicating a set of values to a large extent different from those predominant in classical music concerts. He suggested that by the early twentieth century, the opera world “evolved as a business, a system of training, a popular entertainment, a cultural touchstone, and an object of study.” Its core repertory established “a system of cultural upbringing for operagoers and performers alike” by which they would “see and hear canonic operas in canonic productions and learn to think about them in canonic ways” (Parakalis 2014, 862).
A variety of canonic repertories evolved in opera companies during the eighteenth century which had little to do with one another but took central roles in major cities. A collection of studies about musical canon chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows how varied repertories and social frameworks provided the basis for a diversified array of canonic operas, from a single Italian work—Giovanni Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (1733)—to King Frederick the Great’s offering regular performances of pieces in opera seria right up to his death in 1787 (Newark and Weber 2020). Yet arguably the most significant opera canons evolved in Paris, where works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors survived at the Paris Opéra, from his death in 1687 up to the early 1770s. A wholly new canonic repertory then came into the same hall under the leadership of Gluck, along with pieces by Nicolò Piccinni, Antonio Sacchini, and Antonio Salieri, until they were all eliminated in the late 1820s. That canons in opera and concerts had little relationship became clear when, in 1817, Alexandre-Êtienne Choron tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the old repertory at the Opéra but then went on to found a society for old sacred music, the Institution royale de musique classique et réligieuse. Likewise, François Habeneck began the successful deconstruction of the old repertory in 1821, but went on seven years later to begin the Concerts of the Conservatoire, which became the city’s focal point of classical music (Weber 2019).
During the nineteenth century, an intimate relationship developed between opera and the worlds of business and fashion, for which there existed only limited parallels in classical music concerts. Far more money was required to run a musical theater than for putting on a concert series, and the financial aspects of opera thereby entered intimately into discourse about the music. In fact, it was common for music critics to cite precisely how much money was in the till after a performance, a point which was rarely mentioned for concerts. Publishers increasingly exerted tight control over both opera houses and musical periodicals and thereby influenced critical discourse directly. The contrast in values between concerts and opera is evident in London during the 1850s, when critics attacked the frequent performance of excerpts from operas by Rossini and Donizetti, arguing that such a practice went against the principle of the musical work that had been established for the symphony. That principle, of the “work concept,” most prominently argued by Lydia Goehr, was often used ideologically against the policies of the Royal Opera House (Goehr 2007, Hall-Witt 2020).
With the rise of the repertory called grand opéra, theaters in most cities began to keep other kinds of popular operas on stage longer than had been conventional. Not only did the repetition of pieces by Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini keep bringing back crowds for an unusually long time, but also the scale and cost of production was mounting, holding back production of new works. Other factors contributed to this tendency: the expansion of railroad lines helped singers move around more, but thereby made it harder for any one manager to bring key figures together; and publishers increasingly controlled the choice of repertory at major theaters in order to profit from the pieces they had helped develop. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker confronted this change critically in A History of Opera, accusing the opera world of sinking into stagnation as repertory became limited to music from Mozart to Puccini: As they put it, “The privileging of the new slowly became eroded by the hardening of an operatic repertory … serving as a forbidding benchmark for new creations” (Abbate and Parker 2012, 528). Quantitative analysis is necessary for coming to grips with this massive change in the temporal framework of opera repertory. A study made in 1968 documents the steady decline in performances of new works in Germany during the twentieth century (Kőhler 1968).
The same popular operas, originally almost entirely Italian, spread to North and South America in the early nineteenth century. Tours which had begun offering concerts of popular numbers then began presenting staged versions, from which locally focused canons of aging works reflected the cosmopolitan taste in Europe at the time. As Benjamin Walton has shown for Buenos Aires and Montevideo, certain operas emerged as central to repertories in the cities visited by the touring companies. Even though the repertories in general paralleled what was done in Europe, some theaters developed their own canonic traditions, to an unusual extent for Bellini. By around 1850, repertories were formed through an intricate set of negotiations between domestic and foreign traditions, establishing contrasting kinds of canonicity in different regions. Most important of all, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia took on what Walton called “a foundational, Homeric position” in more extreme terms than happened in any European context (Walton 2020). Similar companies began touring the United States; in New York, an unusual mixture of Wagnerian and Italian works evolved at the Metropolitan Opera after its founding in 1880. Indeed, the assortment of genres and operas performed there by around 1910 seems remarkably similar to what has been offered recently (Ahlquist 2020). The Wagnerian repertory took an even more central role in Japan; Brooke McCorkle reports that, following the Mejii Restoration in 1868, Wagnerian ideas were employed in an effort to modernize the culture, being seen as representative of the ancient Japanese spirit. Excerpts from the operas were offered occasionally in the 1890s, and by 1920, major scenes were being offered from Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger, and Lohengrin (McCorkle 2018).
Commentary on Richard Wagner ended up rivaling the scale and consequence of commentary on Beethoven that was made in the world of classical music. Wagner himself began that tendency, drawing implicit parallels with Beethoven in his writings; as Arne Stollberg pointed out, Wagner was unique in the “intentional self-canonization” of constructing a canon around his music, making the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth serve as its institutional basis. That established Wagner, Stollberg concludes, “as a future-imagining example, as the necessary consequence of the intended creation of the Nation, indeed as well as the ritualization of all parameters of performance” (Stollberg 2013, 462). Despite all that, the movement termed Wagnerism which flowed from confrontation with his music and ideas did not necessarily follow his lines of thought. Individual writers adapted Wagnerian thinking for their own purposes, reshaping his sweeping horizon of expectations to portray what they saw as future ideals. Following Wagner did not necessarily imply any specific political or literary party; arguably, it replaced liberalism as a vehicle by which to speculate about directions of change (Weber and Large 1984).
The rethinking of the criticism written by Eduard Hanslick has shown his daily pieces to be more open-ended than the notoriously controversial essay Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music [1854]). Hanslick’s career as a critic evolved in close relationship with the gradual predominance of canonic repertories which occurred in programs and public taste, stimulating him to critique both new and canonic works in authoritative intellectual fashion. While his writing bears deep philosophical implications, as Nicole Grimes has shown, his main goal was to make influential judgments on specific pieces, leading him to avoid styling himself either as historian (as Fétis did) or as philosopher (as A. B. Marx) (Grimes 2013). The Viennese revival of Gluck’s Alceste in 1885 led Hanslick to recount the contrasting views of Rousseau, Berlioz, and Wagner; he reported that nobody in the city could remember having seen anything by the early master of “die klassische Kunst” (classical art) (Hanslick 1896).
For all the major differences between canons in opera and concerts, the two worlds interacted where their old repertories found common ground. A certain amount of cross-referencing arose in the constellations of composers honored by concerts and opera houses, usually triads of canonic figures: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven versus Gluck, Sacchini, and Piccinni, and subsequently Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. There were similar monuments honoring great composers: in 1828, the city of Liège went so far as to install the heart of André-Modeste Grétry at the center of the city’s market; and in 1901, Verdi’s body was moved to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo, where “Va, pensiero” from his Nabucco was conducted by Arturo Toscanini leading a chorus of 820 singers. Still, the most highly acclaimed opera composers—arguably Lully, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Wagner–ended up with publics considerably larger than did Beethoven, Schumann, or Brahms in the nineteenth-century concert hall. Even though Beethoven was honored deeply in philosophical terms, in the last analysis the opera world marshaled a much larger and more diverse population of listeners than did concerts.
Still, concerts contributed to the formation of opera canons by extending the lifetime of popular pieces after the works themselves were no longer performed. In defining the concept of monumentalism, Alex Rehding shows that Wagner honored Gluck basically for the instrumental music given certain famous scenes (Rehding 2009, 121–122). The Conservatoire concerts did similarly with the music of Grétry, performing chiefly his orchestral interludes. Moreover, benefit concerts would feature selections from a wide array of canonic operas. In 1869, for example, Mme. Ronzi, a retired Parisian opera singer, offered a program at the Salle Herz which included pieces by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, adding to them selections by Verdi and Gounod (Weber 2008, Ill. 25). While operas by Gluck were offered in only a few cities between 1830 and 1900, concertgoers heard substantial excerpts from them and thereby associated the music with the classical music tradition rooted in such institutions.
The canonic implications found in repertories of popular music are better treated through the thinking of Warburg than of Jauss, since written commentary was usually more limited or less sophisticated. Canonic status was indicated through generalized respect indicated with a variety of verbal gestures; even though the term classical might occur occasionally, a different set of terms were usually employed. Yet what defined canonic popular music was basically its survival, quite as Warburg argued. Survival nonetheless took a modern form, since that was the goal of publishing houses and a key topic of public discussion. More specifically, programs tended to open and close with the oldest pieces, especially if the composers were deceased.
There existed a close relationship between benefit concerts and the song palaces which grew up in every European country. In between stood what was in some countries called the promenade concert, where people sometimes walked and mingled, and where repertory was focused on the best-known songs and instrumental solos. Since such events were common in expensive spa towns, that illustrates the usual tendency for the most widely appreciated musical genres to cross class lines. Often held in large halls with moveable seats, promenade concerts might encourage people to move around more than was conventional in most major halls. Such mingling of supposedly light and serious genres had been common in the late eighteenth century, but had to be given a particular status when, during the 1830s, adherents of the idealistic agenda frowned upon such socializing. We can see that similar exceptions to that influence might occur in benefit concerts, as well. Thus did a Parisian concert include one of Beethoven’s early piano trios along with a widely known song by the extremely popular composer Édmund Lhuillier (Weber 2018).
The new kind of event which best deserves the title of popular music was the Parisian café-concerts, which began appearing in the mid-1840s and became one of the most important regions of musical life there by the mid-1850s. They almost always included a variety of old opera selections, some still in theatrical repertory but others remaining prominent just in such concerts. For example, in 1850, the Pavillon de l’Horloge on the Champs-Élysée opened with the overture to a piece by Boieldieu which was still produced, Les Voitures versées (1808), and ended with the overture to a piece no longer in performance, Henri Berton’s Le Délire, ou les Suites d’une Erreur (1799). The piece from the Parisian version of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Robin des bois, 1824) appeared in various forms on stage. Performing history went far back for another example: a song from a vaudeville of 1808 called Monsieur et Madame Dénis, ou la Veille de la Saint-Jean, which was sung in the 1860s at the Grand Casino de Paris, located near the Place de la Bastille (Weber 2008, Ill. 23).
A leading exception to the limited intellectual scrutiny of popular music was the eagerness with which the French intelligentsia appreciated café-concerts. Numerous critics went out of their way to show their admiration for the most sophisticated singers and repertories. In 1867, a critic attributed aesthetic legitimacy to such venues by praising the lead singer Thérésa (Emma Valadon) as a latter-day Corneille:
Of which art do we speak in this context? Of the choreography, of the music, of the librettos, of the theatre design, of the statues within it? First we hear the coarse cries of Mlle Thérésa; then we encounter a Corneille-like tirade, artfully done.
(L’Eldorado, 1875, pp. 25–26)
Over time, such concerts tended to offer an increasing number of pieces by deceased composers, keeping some in use for quite some time. A promenade concert by a military band in Leipzig held in 1886 included pieces from three well-known works: the overture to Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa (1831), a chorus from Verdi’s Die Lombarden (1843), and Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849). A festival overture written in 1836 by Lortzing was offered on this program along with a piece dedicated to his memory, Fantasie: Ein immortellenkranz auf das Grab Lortzings (Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig, Programme, 1878–1931).
Popular music took on a particularly independent and richly hewed history in London, a tendency which arose in part because the premier institutions for opera and classical music had resisted British composers so strictly. Thus were old popular songs given high canonic status in the London Ballad Concerts from the time it opened in 1867. Held at the 2000-seat St. James’s Hall, the events became one of the most sought-after series in town, featuring recently published pieces that were sung—and often composed by—the best-known British concert singers. That the series was organized by the powerful publishing firm Boosey & Hawkes also gave it strong professional luster. A program would offer about thirty ballads, duets, glees, and pieces for solo piano, usually divided into two acts. The old songs came from a variety of periods; some claimed to have originated in the seventeenth century, and as such they defined a strong cultural heritage in both historical and canonic terms. These pieces were given distinct respect, usually coming first or last, in some cases given notes in the program which pretended to scholarly authority. Such interest in old vocal music had a long history in Britain, dating back to the founding of the Academy of Ancient Music in 1726, the Madrigal Society in 1740, and the Catch Club in 1761 (Weber 1992, Cencer 2017).
The hit song began to take on canonic significance in each of these countries as the nineteenth century progressed. Thus Henry Bishop’s “Home, Sweet Home,” first performed in an English opera in 1823, was performed widely but was officially banned from the concerts of the Philharmonic Society. Likewise, around 1850, Édmund Lhuillier wrote a piece called “Les épouseux de Berry!” (“Oh, Those Fiancés over in Berry!”) which is still sung today. Many such songs were recorded from around 1910, as the market for popular music was stimulated by the recording industry. A similar quiet longevity can be seen in the practice by which in Britain pieces from what was called “English opera” from the eighteenth century—chiefly by Thomas Arne, William Shield, and Charles Dibdin—remained in concert programs right up into the twentieth century, when revivals were made of the operas themselves.
By the 1870s, a crisis had arisen for composers active in classical music concerts, since recent compositions were being relegated to a secondary status within concerts byorchestras, soloists, and string quartets. This problem must be considered within the history of canonic repertories, since it has been central to the classical music world ever since then, affecting many aspects of how the roles variously of canons and new music have been treated. Awareness that composers now faced a much-diminished market for their works stimulated an aggressive movement to promote their central place in concert life alongside programs where few pieces were less than thirty years old. The leaders of the movement began organizations devoted to promoting new music; as early as 1835 there appeared the Society for British Musicians, which by 1860 gave way to less formal such efforts (McVeigh 2000). Then in 1861, Franz Liszt founded the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, and in 1870 Camille Saint-Saëns helped establish the Société Nationale de la Musique. All three organizations sponsored regular concerts focused almost entirely on fairly recent works, as had become rare since around 1850. For example, in 1877, the Tonkünstler-Versammlung (Composers’ Festival) given by Liszt’s organization offered pieces by five young men and Liszt himself (Deaville 1997).
By around 1900 there arose a deep suspicion toward new music among the public which was expressed in rather more categorical terms than had been the case around 1870. A recurrent theme in many parts of Europe was the warning that the public found new works an insufferable burden compared with the continuing refreshment of listening to the classics. The standard repertory in many areas of concert life had become so entrenched that almost anything unfamiliar was treated with suspicion. Listeners ceased to be attracted by a premiere at a concert; critics began making a sweeping denunciation of new music in and of itself. Most significantly, such criticism was aimed at pieces written in conservative just as much as in advanced styles. For example, a Leipzig magazine for amateur choral societies—whose music was rarely progressive—declared in 1913: “So you want even more modern music? Haven’t we had enough already? Isn’t it clear that as soon as a conductor brings on a new piece, the hall empties out immediately, and that is the best way to scare people off?” (Oehmichen 1913, 374). The situation of contemporary opera was particularly bleak in the press during early twentieth century. In 1910, a London newspaper bemoaned the fact that only “a small band of enthusiasts” was willing to pay to hear new operas other than those by Richard Strauss (The Referee, March 5, 1911, p. 5). An article published in Melos in 1932 reported on how few new pieces the country’s concerts and theaters had played even in the prewar period (Herzfeld 1932).
The intellectual framework which evolved around such efforts tended to be factional and crisis-oriented in its struggled for recognition. We have seen that a particular language by which to contest for canonic recognition has been couched, which blends politics, aesthetics, and eulogy. Looking back to the commentators we have discussed, we see the demand by François Fétis that higher learning be brought into music criticism, which seems more pertinent to the situation in 1900 than is the confident idealism of A. B. Marx or the naïve Romanticism of Leigh Hunt. As one commentator suggested in 1909, musical values that were “pleasant, graceful, elegant and eminently musicianly” had more or less disappeared, along with the sentimentality by which Hunt’s friends appreciated Pergolesi and Paisiello (Grew 1909). Little sense remained of union between canon and novelty; even though the New German School surrounding Liszt grew out of the idealism of 1830s, its spokesmen ended up opposing bitterly those, like Hanslick, who had redefined the classical music tradition with sharp-edged new critical tools.
Yet there also developed a vision of a musical avant-garde which gradually evolved in the course of the twentieth century. The very term and concept new music arose, helping composers assert themselves as a professional interest group but also seeking a new public. As one commentator put it, “given all these complaints that we can’t bring back the great classical period, we need to create our own” (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, January 1, 1852, p. 3). The rallying of composers to the cause of new music emerged in close but not identical relationship with political movements focused on aggressive nationalistic movements, such as can be seen in Germany, France, and Britain. The movement for new music seems to have had some effect, since by the 1880s the proportion of pieces by living composers increased somewhat after declining precipitously for over a half century. The public prominence of many composers improved by the early twentieth century because many had found a solid institutional base as professors in the conservatories being established all over Europe—indeed, Fétis, Marx, and Hanslick also had academic positions. Voldemar Bargiel, for example, whose piano music is still admired today, studied at the Leipzig Conservatorium and then taught at the equivalent institution in Cologne.
The most positive effort to promote new music came in 1922, with the founding the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) at the annual music festival in Salzburg. The ISCM evolved as a forum within which its adherents confronted the nature and future of their movement, albeit with bitter dispute along the way. Sarah Collins has shown the deep intellectual and factional divisions in the organization, brought about by the very nature of what it was trying to do (Collins 2019). Canon and novelty accordingly become polar opposites in modern musical culture; in some contexts programs are composed entirely of one or the other, even though careful compromises have increasingly been worked out to bridge the gap between them. During the twentieth century, concerts of the kind given by the ISCM were to expand into a much larger and influential force in musical culture. Even though the classical music public did not fully accept novelty as central to repertoire, composers such as Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Philip Glass have been recognized as at the center of world musical culture. Thus did the twin frameworks of canon and contemporaneity emerge as contending cultures variously in opera, concerts, and popular music. We can apply Hans-Robert Jauss’s concept, the horizon of expectations, to the continuing stream of musical events which came about in the dynamic succession of new contexts, where contemporary music has taken on new aesthetic and social roles. The impact of the years 1900 through 1930 is still felt among us as we confront the unceasing sequence of experimental musical possibilities.