Most music historians tell us about composers and their works, but scarcely mention their public who listened and enjoyed the music. For a long time, I am curious about the public and the circumstances of musical life in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Most music historians tell us about composers and their works, but scarcely mention their public who listened and enjoyed the music. For a long time, I am curious about the public and the circumstances of musical life in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The growth of music public in the 18th and 19th centuries can be examined in three public spheres; theater, salon, and public concert. The theater originally derived from the court, it became a public sphere after the mid-18th century. The salon also derived from the court and transformed into the private sphere of aristocrats. It became also a public sphere with the active participation of middle class after the 18th century. Above all, since the 19th century, the public concert became the most important route for the formation of the new music public integrating the two classes. For this study, I limit my investigation to the public concert.
The chances of integration of the two classes seemed particularly high in concert life. The sudden growth of concert life during 1830s suggest that the social scene had a high degree of malleability to accommodate such new social needs. A unified public had emerged in a number of ways. In the first place, the social barriers between the bourgeois elite and the rest of the middle class became more substantial. The reserved seats made the change explicit. In the second place, the bourgeois and aristocratic elites now played the same kinds of leadership roles in concert life. In the third place, the bourgeois elite now exercised as powerful an influence over taste as did the nobility. Finally the sense of a common identity was apparent among the two classes.