The period from the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century is often characterized as a time when individual patronage waned and was replaced by more anonymous and collective market forces. As Harold Perkin explains, traditional patronage relationships represented “the middle term between feudal homage and capitalist cash nexus,” and were replaced, ostensibly, by more or less open forms of competition which relied on different criteria of merit: “Patronage … contained an element of selection by merit, measured by the judgment and importance of the patron. Competition, on the other hand, appealed to a far more impartial judge, ‘fortune,’ ‘market forces,’ or material success.” This alleged dichotomy between personal aristocratic patronage and competition for a middle-class audience appears frequently in the accounts of music history concerning this period. For example, Donald Grout writes that “Patronage was on the wane and the modern musical public was coming into being.” Longyear describes the early nineteenth-century musician as “no longer under patronage.”

There are several problems with this view. First, contemporaries used the term “patronage” to refer to any and all sources of financial support for music and musicians. The narrower definition – personal, aristocratic patronage – came to be expressed by the words “connection” and “interest.” Secondly, the polarization between personal patronage and market competition is overdrawn. Musicians' careers reveal a much more subtle and complex range of personal, professional, and financial arrangements than can be subsumed under these two categories.