The story of the orchestra in the nineteenth century usually focuses on two types of orchestras: theatre orchestras – such as La Scala, the Queen's Theatre (London), and the Paris Opéra – and concert societies – such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris), and the New York Philharmonic. It concentrates on the conductors who led these orchestras, many of whom were also famous composers, such as Weber, Spontini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Wagner, whose works form a large part of today's ‘classical’ music repertory. This story is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Broadly speaking, the British reception of foreign musicians appearing in London at the end of the eighteenth century was one of adulation. Most of these artists had arrived via Paris, where some had acquired a mantle of sophistication unknown in London. Paris was a city of fashion, which, if it could not rival London in economic clout, was the acknowledged European capital of culture, of refined taste and manners. British amateurs were therefore happy to admit these foreign artists into their homes both for private concerts, and in the capacity of music teachers for themselves and their children. One of the most alluring – not to mention gifted – of the performing artists to arrive in London from Paris was Giovanni Battista Viotti, whose public concerts in the last decade of the eighteenth century were among the most popular of the many that were on offer.

In the course of the development of Western culture, the ideas of Plato have wielded enormous influence. One of Plato's most influential ideas is his particular conception of truth. For Plato, truth exists in a different realm of reality from ourselves, a realm unlike the things we see around us in space and time. Truth consists of ideal being or ideal essences, subsisting in what he called the world of the forms.

The writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) constitute perhaps the most powerful and original source in the early German Romantic discourse on autonomous music, itself a spearhead of a European trend that matured at he turn of the eighteenth century. Wackenroder's perfervid yet strangely lucid and insightful observations on art and music are founded on the notion of Kunstreligion (‘art religion’), which he uses to replace the rational explanations of art, based on knowledge and representation of the external world, and derived from classical philosophy.