A chapter of this size cannot provide much more than an overview of music and class in four major cities (London, Paris, New York and Vienna), but will focus on detail whenever this illustrates the broader argument or reveals developments of particular interest. In the second half of the nineteenth century features of musical life associated with a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie became firmly established. Prominent among such features were the commercialisation and professionalisation of music, new markets for cultural goods, the bourgeoisie’s struggle for cultural domination and a growing rift between art and entertainment.

Presented below is a study of music and class in four cities, not four countries. Nevertheless, these were the major commercial cities of those countries, home to the wealthiest commercial families. In each, there was rapid population growth and the creation of a large market for entertainment. The power wielded by the upper class began to weaken earlier in Paris than in London, and was slowest to give way in Vienna where the bourgeoisie mingled least with the aristocracy. In New York, there were no inherited titles, of course, although the ‘upper ten’ of that city were often disposed to define themselves against the European aristocracy and, at mid-century, were perceived to be not dissimilar to the upper classes of Paris’s Faubourg St Germain or London’s West End. Paris and Vienna both underwent major reconstruction in the second half of the century. Napoleon III instructed Haussmann to redesign Paris following the 1848 Revolution, and the result was a city of wide arterial boulevards and symmetrical layouts.

Music, rhetoric and representation

The development of the new subject of aesthetics from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards and the changes in the status of music associated with the rise of ‘Romanticism’ form a constellation which has profoundly affected many aspects of modern thought. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this constellation is the quite widespread acceptance, between the later part of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries in Europe, of the Romantic idea that music might be able to say more about philosophy than philosophy can say about music. Just how strange such an idea would have been during much of the eighteenth century can be gauged by the fact that in his Critique of Judgement of 1790 Immanuel Kant, who was in other respects decisive for the development of Romanticism, still saw music as a lowly art form, the effects of which were analogous to a person in society taking out a perfumed handkerchief whose smell could not be avoided. The wider significance of the changes in the status of music derives from their connection both to major transformations in conceptions of language in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to the new accounts of the mind in the philosophy of the same period. These issues do not fit straightforwardly into the nineteenth century, and it is only possible to understand them if one recognises that the conceptions which determine the aesthetics of at least the first half of the nineteenth century are a product of the later part of the eighteenth century.

An imagined past

Goethe’s letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (9 November 1829) is sometimes cited as an idealisation of the Classical string quartet, in which this genre is treated as a musical embodiment of civilised Enlightenment conversation between intellectual peers, the ‘thread’ of the conversation passing effortlessly through the entire musical ensemble. In other respects Goethe’s comment sheds light upon the relationship between early Romantic instrumental music – specifically chamber music in this context – and its immediate Classical past. The evocation of an ideal mode of Enlightenment conversation suggests a nostalgia for a past, even if that past were nothing but an imagined construction (that is, one of many such possible pasts), in relation to which the early Romantic present might be situated. Although he mentions no specific event, either public or private, nor even a specific repertory, it is clear enough that what Goethe had in mind was one of a series of quartet performances organised in Berlin by Karl Möser, at first informally, as an outgrowth of a tradition of chamber and orchestral concerts he had initiated in 1812, and continued on a more permanent footing from the mid-1820s.

Paris, 1850: Wagner and Meyerbeer

In the winter months of 1850 Richard Wagner found himself once again in Paris – and not for the last time – with the aim of improving his fame and fortune. Around the middle of February he heard a performance of Meyerbeer’s latest sensation, Le prophète, which had received its première ten months earlier (16 April 1849), although the origins of the work stretch back to the 1830s. In his autobiography Wagner recounts how he noisily exited the theatre in revulsion at the stock operatic roulades to which the false prophet’s mother, Fidès, pours out her grief in the famous Act IV finale. In this new opera he perceived the ‘ruins’ of all the noble aspirations of the 1848 revolution; he read it as a sign of the complete moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the French provisional government, the ‘dawning of a shameful day of disillusionment’ for art, society and politics alike. For Wagner, a rather more hopeful dawn was soon to be signalled by the première of his own Lohengrin under Franz Liszt’s drection at Weimar in August 1850, if under musical conditions rather less auspicious than those enjoyed by Le prophète in Paris.

This nexus of events provides an apt starting-point for surveying operatic developments of the following half-century. The dialectic of Wagner vs. Meyerbeer, as manifested in the examples of Lohengrin and Le prophète, informs a broad spectrum of the operatic repertory to nearly the end of the century – certainly well into the 1880s, when Wagner’s mature ‘music dramas’ gradually displaced the influential spell of his ‘Romantic operas’ Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.

Most historical accounts of European choral movements in the nineteenth century note a certain loss of intensity and idealistic purpose after the revolutions of 1848. Central to the constellation of possible reasons may be the expansion and liberalisation of economies leading to greater mass production and an increasing division of labour. With an enormous growth in musical consumption and participation in massed singing a dilution in the idealistic zeal displayed by the first amateur choral groups was all but inevitable. The changes in musical production were equally predictable with an increasing distinction between the amateur and the professional that may have resulted in some decline in the musical capabilities of the former. Dahlhaus relates the withering of the seemingly holistic combination of conviviality, educative purpose and bourgeois self-display to the increasing polarisation of the public and private spheres; audiences became an anonymous, cosmopolitan public who no longer fully shared the social brotherhood of the amateur singers. Steady economic growth contributed to a sense of hedonism rather than idealism in some places, such as Napoleon III’s France, but also to more authoritarian, centralizing regimes. It was not unknown for choral establishments to be subject to police observation and many inevitably swapped their idealism for a more reactionary stance. On the other hand, the very fact that some musical institutions provoked official surveillance suggests that they must have retained some of their radical elements.

The decline of traditional choral foundations

Johann Nikolaus Forkel paints a grim picture of the state of German choral foundations in 1801. Now that music is dominated by the untutored tastes of the ‘Liebhaber’ its necessity as a serious fundamental of education and worship is eroded:

What seems particularly ironic about Forkel’s statement is his sense that a modern Christian should be ‘enlightened’ (later he notes that the Enlightenment has brought many improvements to religion, if not yet to religious music). It was, after all, the Enlightenment that had swept away the last vestiges of music as a fundamental of education. The scholastic notion of music theory as the basis of mathematics and cosmic order survived into the early eighteenth century, and some of this traditional prestige reflected on music’s more practical, rhetorical function as an adornment of liturgy and a medium of scriptural interpretation. The Enlightenment brought both a demystification of the powers of music and a turn away from the general hegemony of religion per se. If music was no longer central to the academic core of education, if the educational establishments were less intimately connected with the church and if the churches no longer recognised any special spiritual power in music, the decline that Forkel observes seems hardly surprising.

Beethoven vs. ‘Beethoven’

On 28 May 1810, a young woman wrote to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describing her new acquaintance, Ludwig van Beethoven:

Symphonic practice in later nineteenth-century Europe was no unitary activity that we should collapse into a crisp, linear narrative. The reality was messier. It would be more accurate to regard the world of orchestral composition as an arena of competing ideologies and diverse aims, a field of energy and circulation. To be sure, the energy was anything but random. Composers, performers, publishers, critics, academics, students and audiences channelled it through a flurry of enabling and constraining preconditions, historical and cultural circumstances sorted out differently by different groups. Among the most significant precondition was the idea of tradition – or, more to the point, the struggle over the presumed ownership of that tradition. By the second half of the century the European idea of the symphony as a high-status cultural achievement was nourished by lovingly shaped readings of the genre’s Austro-Germanic past. Commonly enough, the grounding shape was reinforced by a heroic tale: the ascent to the apex, Beethoven – embodying the long-sought liberation of the modern idea of greatness in instrumental music, the definitional moment of full symphonic adequacy, the ‘undeniable’ launching of ‘the new era of music’ (as Liszt put it in 1855) – followed by a crisis of continuation in subsequent decades.

Spurred also by external factors – technological, economic, political, ethnic-national – the symphonic crisis invited a number of solutions: it had been disseminated to several different publics on several different terms. As a result, by mid-century no central authority was able to establish a consensus concerning the best way to continue the tradition while still honouring its past.

In the sphere of art music, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation and wider dissemination of many of the structures and institutions which had been set up in Europe during the preceding decades, and which were now developing worldwide and gaining in status. Models for operatic, orchestral, educational, publishing and journalistic institutions provided by the major European centres – particularly Paris, Vienna and London – became established in the New World to the extent that cities such as Boston and New York emerged as their potential rivals on the increasingly intercontinental stage of middle-class musical life. Such consolidation took various forms: nationalist drive and the breakdown of court culture lay behind the emergence of municipal musical culture in much of what now constitutes the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary; in North America, the ‘European’ musical traditions of cities such as New York and Boston were initiated by immigrant German musicians and embraced by a wider middle class hungry for cultural status. The pace of consolidation also varied: in France and Britain, for instance, it was leisurely in comparison with the breathless rush from urbanisation to the establishment of Europeanised cultural institutions in a new city such as Los Angeles, in which the developments of a century in Europe took place in just a few decades, starting in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the relatively late appearance of now-familiar pillars of musical life in some European cities should not be forgotten: through the entire period under consideration Paris lacked a purpose-built orchestral concert hall and Vienna a permanent civic symphony orchestra. In these areas respectively each city lagged well behind Chicago and Boston, for example.

Clavierübung

Quite what the implications of the curiously unprepossessing term ‘Keyboard Practice’ are is less clear than one might suppose. Players now are used to Studies or études, exercises or essercizi, and every child knows ‘to practise’ means ‘to exercise oneself in the performance of music with the view of acquiring skill’ (OED). Clearly, with the Goldberg Variations one does do this, and an English publisher of the time might well have called them Lessons for the Harpsichord, when ‘lesson’ suggested written-down music helpful to players, either as practical instruction or as substitutes for compositions and improvisations of their own. But there is another kind of practice, the kind spoken of by lawyers and doctors as they ‘practise a profession’ or ‘put their subject into practice’ or even ‘buy into a practice’: this is practice as distinct from theory.

Musica prattica had been a common term in treatises of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy and in those elsewhere imitating or influenced by them, treatises applying the rules of harmony and counterpoint for the creating of actual, written-down music. When in 1689 Johann Kuhnau – uncommonly for the time, a university graduate (Leipzig, in law) and not averse to literary conceits – came to publish a set of seven harpsichord suites in his university town, he seems to have coined the term Clavier-Übung as a German equivalent of the venerable Italian term.

The theme-type

The title, ‘An Aria with diverse Variations’, already produces a puzzle: if the thirty movements are variations on this aria or theme, why is it never heard again or even hinted at in paraphrase or some decorated form until it is repeated, sans différence, at the end? (Repeated but not written out: the player is told Aria da capo è fine.)

Of course, it is the harmonies underlying the Aria that serve as the basis for the variations, thirty distinct essays exploring the language and genres of music as its composer understood them. But when, during the century or so between Frescobaldi's and Handel's published sets, the theme of some variations had been called ‘aria’ or ‘air’ by composers, both its melody and harmony had been glimpsed from time to time. This was also the case with Bach's various other variation-works: not only in the early Aria variata and chorale partitas – where part of the point was to hear the hymn-tune, to be reminded of it, how ever subliminally – but so it is too in the mature Musical Offering and the Canonic Variations, where the themes continue to be ‘glimpsed’.

Perhaps some players or listeners fancy that in the course of the thirty movements they do hear the original melody of the Aria now and then, but I for one do not and can only assume that one is not meant to: we have here variations or varied treatments not of a melody but of a series of chords, which are explored in a series of discrete genres and according to a uniquely ingenious plan.