Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870

Author(s): William Weber

Reviewed work(s):
Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jun.,
1977), pp. 5-22
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 MASS CULTURE AND THE RESHAPING
OF EUROPEAN MUSICAL TASTE, 1770-1870"

WILLIAM WEBER

California State University, Long Beach

Around the walls of the older European concert halls are embla-
zoned the names, often even the faces, of the master composers,
those awesome figures who have acted as secular deities in modern
musical culture. First come the central trinity - Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven - then the early prophets - Handel and J. S. Bach
- and finally the recent disciples - Schubert, Weber, Schumann,
Spohr, and Mendelssohn. For concertgoers still today, these names
seem written into the heavens or engraved upon tablets of musical
authority. They seem timeless and irremovable in their rule over
classical-music taste.
But upon closer inspection we can see that these tablets were
made not of ancient stone but of moder plaster. The rise of the
masters to musical sainthood took place during the 1850's and
1860's. It was only then that their works came to dominate the
concert repertoire and their names were put up on high for all to
behold. Their elevation marked a fundamental change in the ori-
entation of European musical taste, for never before had the music
of dead composers been played so often or ascribed so lofty a sta-
tus in musical life. As late as 1840 most Viennese and Parisian con-
certgoers scoffed at the idea that the greatest music might be the
music of the past. In 1846, a Parisian journalist mocked the clas-
sical concerts at the Conservatoire - >Ifmusic is dead /Well, then
let us inter it!/ On the air of tra deri deri /On the air of tra deri
deri!<(/1
* This article was
originally a lecture given at Indiana University, March
29, 1976 and was prepared for publication with the assistance of a grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
1 Monde musical, April 30, 1846,
pp. 2-3.
6 INTERNATIONALREVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

Now, it may seem blasphemous to some ears, but we must regard

the rise of the musical masters as an early form of mass culture
- just early forms, of course, and therefore somewhat limited, but
nonetheless clever, profit-seeking mass culture. The new respect
for the masters was as much a commercial as an artistic phenom-
enon, one which took many saleable forms during the second half
of the century - medallions, lithographs, busts, and a multitude of
literary expositions. It grew directly from the burgeoning industries
of music publishing, instrument manufacture, and concert man-
agement.2 It has not been from artistic respect alone that contem-
porary rock artists have made self-serving comparisons with the
masters - >Roll over, Beethovenm goes that song - since com-
mercial exploitation of the masters was a major starting point of
the modern music business.
In this lecture I am going to trace the evolution of mass culture
in European musical life from about 1770 to 1870 and show how it
culminated in the rise of the classical masters. I will first discuss
the growth of the publishing industry, the force which provided the
main impetus behind the commercial development of the musical
world. The argument will be made that the industry had the dy-
namics of mass culture from the start of the nineteenth century.
I will then sketch out the main large-scale concerts which appeared
during the middle of the century and brought a new impersonal
social structure to concert life. Finally, I will show how the classical
repertoire of these concerts reshaped European musical taste by
polarizing values for entertainment and serious artistry. The re-
sulting duality of >>popular(and >>classical<music has since then
been the keystone of musical mass culture.
I will also beg off from doing several other things. I will not try
to investigate the relations between mass culture and macrocosmic
dimensions of society such as class structure or industrialization.
Most important of all, I will not hazard any conclusions about its
impact on how music was written. My scope geographically will be
broad but will be limited primarily to the three major European
capitals - London, Paris, and Vienna - and to Leipzig, the Ger-
man city most prominent in nineteenth-century musical life. I will
also not delve into the differences among them.
In the musical field the term >mass culture, can be defined in a
relatively concrete manner. It should be conceived as performance
or dissemination of music which does not rest upon personal re-
lationships between musicians and the public and for which ob-
taining - indeed, manipulating - a wide public is a primary goal.
This is not just a matter of brute numbers of people buying music
2 The
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna has an extensive collection
of such memorabilia: see Richard von PERGER and Robert HIRSCHFELD,
Geschichte der k. k. Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna 1912,Zusatz-Band,
pp. 85-154.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 7
or going to concerts. What has characterized musical mass culture
primarily has been rather the impersonality of relationships bet-
ween listeners and performers and the active exploitation of a broad
public by the music business. To be sure, neither the size of audi-
ences nor the circulation of sheet music during the nineteenth cen-
tury compares at all closely to contemporary levels, and early mar-
keting techniques may seem crude by comparison with those used
for Elton John or Leonard Bernstein. But the impersonality of con-
cert events and the manipulative devices of the publishing industry
had much the same basic qualities then as now. Because of these
dynamics, the appearance of 1,000 instead of 300 people at some
concerts and the publication of tens of thousands instead of several
hundred new pieces of music per year changed the social structure
of musical life fundamentally.3
Now, in the old society, in the world we have lost, music-making
revolved around one-to-one personal relationships. Music was what
one person did for another. There were no formal institutions where
people went for the objective, impersonal purpose of simply hear-
ing music. People danced and courted to music, passed the time
making music, and celebrated with music. Most of the ceremonial
occasions accompanied by music were directly associated with
specific events in individuals' lives - marriages, funerals, name-
days, saints days. Moreover, the relationship often counted for far
more than the music itself. Even in the households of the upper
classes of society musicians were not a discrete Drofession but rath-
er simply those people who, for one reason or another, sang or
played for those around them. In a shrewd study of English musi-
cians of the late sixteenth century, Walter Woodfill has shown that
few performers were formal, resident retainers but rather were
people from a wide range of occupations who made music for others
and obtained an unspecific reward, some kind of personal gra-
tuity, and often performed other services for the same households.4
Performers in the large-scale ensembles of the eighteenth century
almost always had other functions in the household; a list of the
members of one German Hofkapelle in 1783 cited, among others,
two porters, one cupbearer, two man-servants and the chaplain.5
3 The term has not been
applied at all intensively to the history of Euro-
pean classical music thus far. The most useful works on the history of con-
certs which at least bear upon the subject are the following: Percy M.
YOUNG, The Concert Tradition, London 1965; Arthur LOESSER, Men, Women
and Pianos, New York 1954; and Hans ENGEL, Musik und Gesellschaft, Ber-
lin 1960.
4 Walter WOODFILL, Musicians in English Society, Princeton 1953, pp.
59-62.
5
Christoph-Hellmut MAHLING, *Herkunft und Sozialstatus des hofischen
Orchestermusikers im 18. und friihen 19. Jahrhundert in Deutschland(, in
Sozialstatus des Berufsmusikers vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert, Kassel 1971,
p. 125.
8 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

Relationships between performers and their patrons were there-

fore the central source of social order in musical life. The key to
success for musicians was not expanding the number of such ties
but rather maintaining them with careful diplomacy in the small-
group social context of the time. The frequency of vagabondage
among low- (and in some cases not so low-) ranking musicians made
this concern important to all concerned; reputations depended as
much upon simple trustfulness as upon musical ability.6
The rise of public concerts during the 18th century changed the
nature of these relationships surprisingly little. The most prominent
early concerts were performances by dedicated amateurs - Kenner
und Liebhaber, as they were called in German - assisted by mu-
sicians of usually greater ability from a lower social standing who
lived in part by teaching and performing in bourgeois and aris-
tocratic homes. The people who went to these events where accord-
ingly the friends and relatives of the performers, and members of
the local community. Such concerts thus rested upon a structure
of personal relationships and the complementary needs of the dif-
ferent kinds of participants. Their highly personalized character
limited their growth into large-scale or professional institutions.
When that did happen, as in the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde of Vienna after the Revolution of 1848, it came only
through forceful and controversial actions by professionals.7
Even commercially-oriented concerts sponsored by individual
musicians had such a fabric of relationships. To be sure, such con-
certgivers now acted in a entrepreneurial capacity, since they put
on events for more than one houshold and charged a fee for admis-
sion. An element of commercial objectivity thereby entered into the
relationships with their patrons. But these concerts did not have an
impersonal public, for they remained dependent upon domestic
music-making until after the middle of the nineteenth century. The
growth of amateur musical training during the eighteenth century
had made teaching in bourgeois and aristocratic homes a broad,
highly lucrative market and provided a stable source of income
from which musicians could launch careers as public performers.
These events, usually called >Academies, or >Benefit Concerts<, had
audiences primarily of the families for which the sponsor had
taught or performed, since hiring a musician for such purposes car-
6 For works on the social history of music in the medieval and
early
modern periods, see Henry RAYNOR, A Social History of Music, New York
1972; Walter SALMEN, Der Fahrende Musiker im Mittelalter, Kassel 1960;
Heinrich W. SCHWAB, ?Zur sozialen Stellung des Stadtmusikantenc, in
Sozialstatus, pp. 9-26.
7
LOESSER, op. cit., pp. 88-96; Michel BRENET, Les Concerts en France
sous l'ancien rdgime, Paris, 1900; Arnold SCHERING, Musikgeschichte Leip-
zigs, Leipzig 1941; Heinrich KRALIK, Das Buch der Musikfreunde, Vienna
1961.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 9

ried with it an obligation to buy tickets to his or her annual con-

cert. The web of relationships extended to the performers them-
selves, since these concerts had long, elaborate programs played
largely by the colleagues of the sponsor, many of whom were often
amateurs. Touring performers drew upon the same network of ties,
for musicians provided each other with help in obtaining supporting
performers and attracting audiences.8
The benefit concert, like the amateur ensemble, could not become
a large-scale event because personal relationships were so central
to it. No musician could develop enough contacts to draw more than
at most five hundred people to a concert, and many had to give
tickets away to get big houses. It is doubtful whether many con-
certs showed much profit; their purpose was rather to maintain
contacts and develop reputations. In any case, the whole idea of
trying to attract audiences on an impersonal basis was far from
the imagination of eighteenth-century musicians.
The publication and dissemination of music rested upon a simi-
lar matrix of relationships. Because the cost of printed music was
so high, such scores remained the exception, and few cities had re-
tail outlets for their sale. The German music historian Klaus Hort-
schansky has shown that the vast majority of music written in most
European countries was sold copy-by-copy through a complex web
of ties among composers, musicians, and interested amateurs. Each
composer would ask colleagues in different cities to solicit sub-
scriptions to a new composition (whether printed or not) for a small
remuneration, usually advertising these agents in periodicals. The
principal buyers were the local ensembles we have just discussed,
therefore a quite limited market. Many musicians spent a consider-
able part of their time selling music in this manner. Once again
we find that trusting relationships were the key to success: Hort-
schansky cites instances where certain composers incurred the
wrath of their colleagues by refusing to return expected favors of
this kind. Here, too, we can see that this system was self-limiting,
since only rarely could a work receive more than four or five hun-
dred subscribers.9
The personalized commerce and concert life of the eighteenth
century never disappeared completely from European musical life.
Amateur orchestras today still have an internal structure not very
different from those back then; recitals have remained in many
cases presentations by local performers to their students and col-
8
YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 28-45; LOESSER, op. cit., pp. 88-96; William WE-
BER, Music and the Middle Class, London 1975, Chap. III.
9 Klaus HORTSCHANSKY, )>Der Musiker als Musikalienhandler in der
zweiten Hilfte des 18. Jahrhunderts<, in Sozialstatus, pp. 83-102; see also
HORTSCHANSKY, ?Pranumerations- und Subskriptionslisten in Noten-
drucken deutscher Musiker des 18. Jahrhunderts,, Acta Musicologica, 1968,
40, pp. 154-174.
10 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

leagues. But around them have developed broadly based, imper-

sonal social systems which have come to control these concerts in
powerful ways. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of mod-
ern mass culture is how it has interlocked with personalized in-
stitutions in this manner.
Musical mass culture first appeared in the publishing industry.
The key to these changes was the opening up of a vast new market
of music played by amateurs at home. Between 1780 and 1850 tech-
nological breakthroughs and a forthright new brand of entrepre-
neurship made both publishing and retailing of music a burgeoning
consumer business. The most striking thing about the technological
advances was that they were exploited so soon for specific needs of
musical merchandising. Publishers seized upon lithography immedi-
ately after its invention at the turn of the century to print sheet mu-
sic for home use with flashy, colorful illustrations which proved
easily saleable. New methods of movable type served a different
market, the mass choral movement, because they were able to
produce cheap, easy-to-read vocal parts for singers still struggling
to scan their lines. Lastly, improvements in engraving techniques
provided the sharp detail needed for the complicated virtuosic and
orchestral scores at large-scale concerts.10
The problems of rising productivity rates and falling prices in
publishing industry are too complex and have been studied too lit-
tle to be worth discussing at any length here. More to our purposes
is to see how the simple availability of music increased so enor-
mously after the turn of the century. During the 1770's and 80's
most publishers' catalogues listed between 100 and 1500 items. By
1824 the London firm of Boosey cited 10,000 foreign publications
alone; by 1827 the general catalogue of Whistler and Hofmeister in
Leipzig had accumulated a total of about 44,000 items; and in 1838
Parisian firm of d'Almaine claimed to have access to over 200,000
the plates."1
The spread of retail outlets had much to do with the increase in
publications. Hortschansky reports that during the 1780's some of
the people who dealt in subscriptions began buying in
quantity and
selling after publication at a mark-up; he suspects that publishers
then started dealing with them directly to get better terms.12 The
subscription systems could not handle large quantities of music and
was displaced by full-time music-sellers, many of them the mu-
10 See A. Hyatt KING, 400 Years
of Music Printing, London 1964; F.
CHRYSANDER, >>ASketch of the History of Music Printing(, Musical Times,
1877, 18, pp. 524-527, 584-587; A. DAVIDSON, Bibliographie zur Geschichte
des Musikdrucks, Uppsala 1965.
11 LOESSER, op. cit. pp. 251-259; Carl Friedrich WHISTLING and Frie-
drich HOFMEISTER, Handbuch der Musikalischen Literatur, Leipzig 1818-
1827. See also Alfred NOVELLO, A Short History of Cheap Music, London 1887.
12
HORTSCHANSKY, ),Pranumerations((, p. 165.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 11

sicians who formerly had sold music on the side and now began to
specialize in that field. The person-to-person distribution system
thus gave way to a professionalized international trade network.
In London directories listed twelve shops selling music in 1750, 30
in 1794, and 150 in 1824; in Germany one such source cited 333
shops in 1843, but that was probably only half the number.13
Crafty merchandising also had a lot to do with the speedy expan-
sion of the publishing industry. Arthur Loesser has given a marvel-
lously vivid description of the exploitative techniques which pub-
lishers employed.14 They obtained music aimed directly at the
tastes and performing levels of the average amateur, and sympho-
nies or concerti of the older school were transcribed so as to be
easier and more flashy; everything was advertised as >>brilliantbut
not difficult<. Publishers developed what Loesser calls the >>title
racket< - titles with enticing come-ons like Polka Favorites of the
Princes, which helped bourgeois families fantasize themselves dan-
cing with the elect, or Beethoven's Wellington's Victory, which
allowed them to imagine themselves in the smoke at Waterloo.
The succession of new operas being hyped in the growing internati-
onal press provided hit tunes which were all transcribed for ama-
teurs and made into cultural necessities for the increasingly fashion-
minded middle classes.
All of which is quite familiar to modern ears. Though the music
may sound strange and unexciting today, the methods by which it
was sold bear all the hallmarks of manipulative mass culture. Gone
were the days when keyboard pieces were abstract, dainty little
exercises for the tiny clavecin put out in limited editions by a local
Kapellmeister. There certainly had been runs of fashion in musical
life before, but never had they moved so fast or operated through
a commercial framework such as this.
There are, of course, some serious objections to the argument
that early sheet music was mass culture. One is that products sold
just within the still small middle classes should not be considered
on this basis. The trouble with this argument is that the shift from
localized, hand-to-hand distribution to a professional, international
business was itself a quantum leap equally as significant as that
from strictly middle-class to multi-class sales. One can even cast
doubt on the width of distribution of many popular records
today, since the greater breadth in class levels is counterbalanced
by greater specialization by age groups. A second argument is that
a mass culture audience must be an entirely passive, consuming
audience and therefore cannot be compared with a public playing
music as did the people who bought early nineteenth-century sheet
13 LOESSER, op. cit., pp. 251-252; HORTSCHANSKY, >>Der Musiker als
Musikalienhindler<, p. 94.
14
LOESSER, passim.
12 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

music. The problem is that sheet music remained the center of the
popular-music business right up until the invention of the long-play-
ing record in the late 1940's.15If you exclude it from moder mass
culture you eliminate the whole first half of the twentieth century
from consideration.
Besides, identifying the presence of a mass culture must be done
in reference to the people guiding it just as much as to the ones
being guided. It was not only the publishers who had a clear sense
of building a broad, manipulable public; so too had the composers.
The secret behind the legendary popularity of the virtuosi of the
early nineteenth century was their shrewd exploitation of the mar-
ket for sheet music. These outrageous showmen - Spohr and Hum-
mel in the 1810's and 20's and Thalberg and Liszt in the 30's and
40's - began the tradition of plying public musical taste which
shifted quickly and easily from sheet music to the recording and
proceeded to give us Paul McCartney and Elton John. An even more
explicit action in the commercial direction by nineteenth century
composers was their campaign for a universal copyright. This move-
ment was, clear and simple, an effort to obtain a legal mass mar-
ket. It is sobering to one's classical fancies to remember that one
of the key exponents of the reform was the master of the masters,
Ludwig van Beethoven.16
Let us turn to the second area in which the early dynamics of
mass culture emerged: public concerts. Tradition and change min-
gled in a curious way in one area of concerts, for those by virtuosi
developed the least into large-scale events. Individual performers
stayed within the conventional form of the benefit concert and the
network of personal relationships which was its base. Few of these
events had audiences larger than 500 people.'7 Since the virtuosi
were operating on a hectic international schedule, they were not
able to build permanent institutions with large publics. We should
note, however, that the primacy of sheet music in their fame none-
theless made their concerts more than just the localized gather-
ings of the eighteenth century. When one went to a concert by Liszt
or Thalberg, or even to one by a minor performer playing works
by the giants, one went because of the fads which surrounded that
music. The functioning of the relationships within the concert's life
was now controlled by the larger musical market. During the last
quarter of the century the new profession of concert managers then
turned recitals into internationally managed, large-scale events.
15 For
highly informative articles on the emergence of the long-playing
record, see John McDONOUGH, )>1951: Pop Music at the Crossroads(, High
Fidelity, 1976, 26, pp. 49-56, and Edward WALLERSTEIN, ,Creating the
LP Recorda, High Fidelity, 1976, 26, pp. 56-62.
16
Hansjorg POHLMANN, Die Friihgeschichte des musikalischen Urheber-
rechts, Kassel 1962, p. 259.
17 For a realistic accounting of attendance,
particularly see Musical World,
June 7, 1845, pp. 293-294; see also William WEBER, ibid., pp. 42-45.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 13
Orchestras provided the fullest and most permanent basis for
mass concerts. The earliest form, found during the 1830's in many
European cities, was informal events held in dance halls during
the winter and parks during the summer. )Promenades(, the name
used for these concerts in London, is the best generic term for them.
The grass or floor in front of the orchestra was always an open
space; people could walk, talk, and take refreshments during the
performance; and flashing colored lights or fireworks added a psy-
chedelic air. The key figure was always a showman and entrepre-
neur who succeeded in capturing the public imagination from the
podium and solving the difficult managerial problems of such an
undertaking. In London Adolphe Jullien and in Paris Guillaume
Musard presented programs mostly of light dance music and adap-
tations of opera hits. The Viennese waltz concerts of Joseph Lanner
and the Strauss family were a close parallel, differing only in their
provision for dancing on some occasions.
The promenades were large-scale institutions from the very start.
Crowds of a thousand were normal and those of two or three
thousand not unusual. Thanks to unusually cheap ticket prices -
a shilling in London and a franc in Paris - they drew people from
the whole of the middle class and also young, unmarried appren-
tices from the more prosperous artisanry. The crowds were for the
most part from the lower-middle class. Genteel music lessons had
nothing to do with why such people went to these shows.18
After 1850 formal orchestral concerts with classical programs
replaced the promenades in the French and English capitals, though
not in Vienna. There had been attempts at this kind of concert in
Paris before mid-century by Hector Berlioz and other entrepre-
neurs, but the first permanent series was begun by Jules Pasdeloup
in 1854. Charles Lamoureux and Edouard Colonne set up similar
concerts in the next two decades. In London Auguste Mann began
the same kind of low-priced series at the Crystal Palace in 1855,
and the new St. James's Hall initiated several series of both cham-
ber-music and orchestral concerts during the next ten years.19
Concerts of this order spelled the death of the public amateur
orchestral tradition in the three major capitals. During the 1830's
and 40's in London and Paris several orchestras derived from the
model of the eighteenth century tried to obtain a larger public by
hiring professionals as soloists and first-chair players, but the in-
cumbent costs were far too great for them to bear, and the ensem-
bles either disappeared or became strictly private gatherings by
1850. Entrepreneurial musicians set up pay-as-you-go amateur sight-
reading ensembles as something of a replacement. In Vienna the
orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde tried valiantly to
18 Ibid., pp. 108-113.
19
YOUNG, op. cit., pp. 234-238.
14 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

stay with strictly amateur membership, but after the Revolution of

1848 the Society's new leaders professionalized the ensemble and
instituted separate private sessions for amateurs.20 Indicative of
what had happened to the personalized tradition of dilettante per-
formance was a letter to a London music magazine in which an ama-
teur violinist complained that because the city was so big and im-
personal he had no way to locate other players and needed the pe-
riodical's help to do that.21 Thus did the media take on new func-
tions in urban society.
Even elite symphony orchestras manifested tendencies toward
impersonality in their social fabric. Most series attended by the
aristocracy and the upper-middle class during the early nineteenth
century not only had exclusive ticket policies, but also forbade the
use of tickets by anyone other than the purchaser and granted sin-
gle tickets only in exceptional circumstances. In most places these
rules were eliminated during the 1830's and 40's because of demands
by subscribers.22 Then in the second half of the century all of the
orchestras moved to larger halls, most of which seated more than
1000 people. Since exclusiveness remained, one can not call these
concerts true mass events. But they did lose their earlier tight so-
cial bonds and now operated within a larger context of mass pub-
lishing and mass taste.
Choral concerts developed the widest social range among the new
large-scale concerts. Many of the choruses grew directly from small
singing clubs. The main one in London, the Sacred Harmonic So-
ciety, was formed in 1832 from a collection of local groups based
primarily in Dissenting chapels and made up of people from the
artisanry as well as the lower-middle class. The Society established
a concert series in Exeter Hall, a church headquarters, which by
the middle of the 1840's had become one of the most prominent mu-
sical locales in London. The extent to which the former clubs had
changed into a mass institution was indicated by the invitation ex-
tended to the Society to perform at the opening the Crystal Pal-
ace in 1851. A second source of large-scale choral concerts was the
20
WEBER, op. cit., Chapter V, part 2.
21
Dramatic and Musical Review, September 27, 1845, p. 493.
22 It is
significant that the change came about in both London and Leipzig
- two radically different cities - during the 1830's. For London, see Har-
monicon, March 1833, p. 80; Programs of the Concerts of Ancient Music,
1834, xxii; Minutes of the Directors' Meetings of the Philharmonic Society
of London, British Museum, May 22, 1831 and March 11, 1832 (refusals of
permission for exchange of tickets), January 19, 1834 and August 10, 1842
(removal of the rule). For Leipzig, see Programs of the Gewandhaus Orches
tra, Museum der Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, November 30, 1822 (warning
to subscribers not to exchange tickets) and February 13, 1837 (removal of
the rule). The Parisian Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire carefully avoid-
ed the rule at its inception in 1828, as did the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
in 1842 and the London Musical Union in 1845.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 15

singing school. Begun by highly entrepreneurial singing teachers,

the schools quickly changed from small-group educational centers
into choruses numbering in the hundreds which put on festivals all
over England. John Hullah, the most successful teacher-manager,
opened up a hall in London for classes and concerts by his choru-
ses.23
Similar choruses appeared in Paris with public rather than pri-
vate bases and had an even broader scale. In 1833 the singing teach-
er Guillaume Wilhem began the >Orpheon? instructional pro-
gram in elementary schools under municipal sanction and shortly
after extended it to adult classes. The program drew a predomi-
nantly artisanal clientele derived in large part from traditional tav-
ern singing groups, and some of the students themselves became
professional choral directors. Wilhem's successors expanded the
>Orpheon? into a massive national choral program which climaxed
its first decade in 1859 with a concert at the Palais de l'Industrie in
which the press claimed, undoubtedly with some exaggeration, that
6,000 singers from 204 societies from all over France performed be-
fore a crowd of 40,000 people.24
That certainly was mass culture. Throughout the concerts of the
1850's one can feel a lusting for identification with the mass of the
population, a desire to celebrate the emerging urban-industrial ci-
vilization with a grand thronging together in public places. The
minutes of the directing committee of the Sacred Harmonic Soci-
ety reveal complaints that singers balked at attending rehearsals
regularly and only wanted to appear at the big concerts. That
does not just show dislike for choral discipline; it illustrates also
how far the organizations had gone from the tradition of intimate,
local singing clubs.25
But the musical mass culture of the middle of the nineteenth
century was not simply people going to impersonal concerts in large
numbers. To understand how musical taste became mass cul-
ture in a broader respect we must return to the matter raised at
the beginning of this lecture: the masters. By 1860 both the orches-
tral and choral concerts we have been discussing and elite concert
societies had shifted their repertoire primarily to music by the dead
>great composers<. In a moment we shall give some figures in that
regard. The worship of the masters had spread like a lofty canopy
over all of European musical life, over concerts large and small,
high and low.
To grasp the magnitude of the change in programming we must
look back at the assumptions which had underlain musical taste in
23
24
WEBER, op. cit., pp. 100-108.
Albert LAVIGNAC, ed., ,l'Orpheon,,, Encyclopddie de la musique, Paris
1931, p. 3727.
25 Annual
Report, 1832, p. 27; Sixteenth Annual Report (1843-1844), p. 8,
Library of the Royal College of Music, London.
16 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western musical life had

never had a learned, classical tradition comparable to that of liter-
ature and the fine arts.. Since only fragments of Greek and Roman
music had survived, there were no models for humanistic emula-
tion or scholarly study.26 Besides, in many periods music had been
viewed with suspicion on both ethical and religious grounds, and
vagabond musicians lent some credence to that fear. The art re-
mained oriented toward the immediate present; works were com-
posed, enjoyed, and quickly forgotten. There were no masters as we
know them now. Only in religious music - most important of all
the mass - and in musical pedagogy - works like the Art of the
Fugue of J. S. Bach - did there exist a musical high culture, a mu-
sical world for which expertise and serious interest were assumed
as prerequisites.
This did not mean, however, that people thought these qualities
irrelevant to musical experience. Connoisseurs - writers and schol-
ars like Charles Burney or Johann Mattheson - were highly re-
spected figures in musical life. The basic attitude about musical
learning in that era should rather be characterized as the tolerant
- might we say genteel? - belief that >you don't have to know
much, but it's nice if you do(. Mozart said as much in a letter to
his father in 1782 when he described a set of concerti he was writing
as ,a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult...
here and there are things which connoisseurs can appreciate, but I
have seen to it that those less knowledgeable must also be pleased
without knowing why{<.27In his words we can see how polymorp-
hous were the tastes and interests in that musical world. Some pe-
ople went to concerts for simple entertainment, others went for
serious artistry, and nobody saw anything illogical in their being in
the same place at the same time. Connoisseurs just had to put up
with all the chatter in the concert halls.
This intermingling of tastes broke down at the turn of the nine-
teenth century. With the simultaneous collapse of the patronal tra-
dition and rise of the printing industry, musical taste suddenly
went to extremes of levity and seriousness. At one pole stood the
virtuosi, those entrepreneurs who created a fire-storm of popular
demand for music they advertised as ))brilliant but not difficulty,
music which piqued the ear but made no demands upon the mind.
Facile virtuosity was the order of the day, and only a few of the
virtuosic corps - chiefly Liszt and Paganini - were later to make
it into the standard >,serious((repertoire. Most concertgoers not only
did not think you needed to know much about the music; they
26 Renaissance
thought did, however, help shape musical aesthetics; see
Edward LOWINSKY, MMusic in the Culture of the Renaissance., Journal of
the History of Ideas, 1954, 15, pp. 509-553.
27December 28, 1782,Letters of Mozart and His Family, edited and trans-
lated by Emily Anderson, New York 1966, III, 1242.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 17
did not even think it was nice if you did. To most people at concerts,
said a Parisian journalist in 1833, )>musicalfeeling, taste, the study
of the great masters, the science of composition are dissonances to
their ears that you would be ill advised to pronounce before
them<.28
At the opposite pole were the musicians and supporters of newly
founded symphony orchestras who attempted to maintain the tra-
dition of learned music-making and became fanatic devotees of the
German classical school. Before mid-century the organizations made
little headway, for they obtained only a small public, in many
cases had amateurish performing standards, and had little sense
of how to manipulate public taste as did the virtuosi. For most
bourgeois throughout Europe, Beethoven and Mozart were regard-
ed as approachable only by esoteric minds. But in the meantime
the members of this musical world forged the concept of >The
Masters<. In so doing they fashioned the values for seriousness and
learning which were eventually to become the basic tenets of Eu-
ropean concert life.
The printing industry and the larger music business which came
with it must be accounted responsible for much of the breaking
apart of musical values. The development of sheet music not only
widened the music public and made possible the manipulation .of
taste; it also established as a basic fact of life the difference be-
tween connoisseurs and the general public. Now that publishers and
performers could reach so large and exploitable a public, values for
learning and entertainment no longer proved compatible for de-
fining musical undertakings. Each could be put to useful purposes,
but not in the same company.
The craze for the virtuosi did not, however, turn out to be a sta-
ble musical or social compound. By the early 1840's there were mur-
murings in the press that people had had their fill of flashy vir-
tuosity and all that went with it. In 1842 a thoroughly unclassical
book called Paris Today warned that )>forsome time now the mu-
sical world has been the monopoly of coterie and savoir-faire; is it
not time that it at last became that of science and genius?,29 Con-
certgoers had found that virtuosic concerts too often were shady
operations, for the stars on the bills would sometimes not appear
or the whole concert prove a hoax.30 The power of novelty had
worn thin. That shrewdie Franz Liszt certainly saw which way the
wind was blowing; in 1849 he quit giving concerts and moved to
28 Revue musicale, December 28, 1833, p. 403.
9 Parts Actuel, Paris 1842, p. 75.
80 For a sampling of the press comments on this issue see Gazette
musicale,
March 27, 1836, p. 103; Figaro, April 17, 1827, p. 359; Neue komische Briefe
des Hans-Jorgel von Gumpoldskirchen, 1835, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 50; 1839, Vol. 1,
No. 3, p. 60; Dramatic and Musical Review, June 6, 1846, p. 264, July 11, 1846,
p. 333.
18 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

Goethe's Weimar, where he began writing symphonies in his own

serious way and ended up joining the Augustinian order. By 1866
a reporter from Vienna - the town where virtuosi had ruled more
triumphantly than anywhere else - declared with surprise that
>>individualconcert-givers now scarcely dare any longer present
themselves to the public without Beethoven, Chopin, or Schumann<.
>It is not long<, he said, )>since we endeavored to show what a
change has taken place here during the last ten years<<.31
A few figures culled from concert programs can show how right
he was - and not just for Vienna. During the ten seasons after
1815, the works played by the newly founded Gesellschaft der Mu-
sikfreunde included 77 percent by living composers, eighteen per-
cent by living composers, eighteen percent by dead composers, and
five percent which could not be determined. During the ten seasons
after 1838 the percentages were 53, 18, and nine. Then for the ten
seasons after 1849, eighteen percent of the works played were by
living composers, 78 percent by dead composers, and four percent
undetermined - almost exactly the opposite of forty years before.32
The programs of the concerts by individual musicians held at
the Gewandhaus, the main hall in Leipzig, provide an even better
measure, since these events were primarily virtuoso concerts.
Among the 173 works played between 1782 and 1791, 60 percent were
by living composers, 12 percent by dead composers, 24 percent had
no composer cited, and three percent were unidentifiable. Exactly
the same was true during the early 1830's. But between 1850 and
1854 only 56 percent of the works played were by living composers
and 39 percent by dead composers. By the first five seasons of the
1860's only 38 percent of the repertoire came from living com-
posers.33
Even the elite professional orchestras in Paris and London which
had spearheaded the new taste moved into a more strictly classical
repertoire. Among the works played by the Philharmonic Society
of London between 1817 and 1826, 56 percent was by living com-
posers and 43 by dead composers. Between the seasons 1853 and
1862 however, 30 percent was by living and 70 percent by dead com-
posers.34 The Societe des Concerts in Paris, by all accounts the best
31
Dwight's Journal of Music, Boston, 1866, 19, p. 112, reprinted from the
Viennese magazine Recensionen.
32 PERGER and
HIRSCHFELD,op. cit., I, 225-310. All of these volumes
present programs edited carefully with reference to other sources for
accuracy.
33Alfred DORFFEL,Geschichte der Gewandhauskonzerte zu Leipzig, Leip-
zig 1884,pp. 192-229.
34 M. B.
FOSTER, History of the Philharmonic Society of London, London
1912, passim.
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 19

orchestra in Europe, showed much the same change, but topped

the Philharmonic by devoting only 11 percent of its repertoire to
living composers during the 1860's.35
Public taste swung to the masters in part because the conductors
of the symphony orchestras learned to use the new mass musical
market. The conductors active during the 1840's - Felix Mendels-
sohn in Leipzig, Otto Nicolai in Vienna, Frangois Habeneck in Paris,
and John Ella in London - all made themselves into charismatic
figures at the podium and devised grand programs which made the
music of the masters seem awesome rather than esoteric. They did
not depart from the new aesthetics of serious taste; they simply
devised ways of making people think they had the necessary knowl-
edge. Ella, who conducted the chamber-music concerts of the
highly prestigious Musical Union, flattered his public, calling it
))the happy few? of >amateurs of cultivated and refined taste, who
knew the secrets of the masters as cruder dilettantes did not.36
One should not, however, be overly cynical about that puff. The
growth of amateur performance had made a sizable proportion of
the upper levels of the capitals' population musically literate. In
fact, given the weaker competition from other leisure-time activities
during that era, musical literacy was certainly higher than today
and possibly higher even than at any point in the twentieth century.
Amateurs now wanted to brag about their skills in a more concen-
trated, indeed more serious manner than before.
A key element in the public was particularly responsible for the
change. During the late eighteenth century there had emerged in
each of these cities a corps of highly trained, sometimes semi-profes-
sional listeners who poured their energies into advocating the music
they regarded as the bastion of serious music culture. They learned
the entire classical repertoire, wrote about it for magazines and
newspapers, and went unfailingly to orchestral and chamber-music
concerts, often in leadership capacities. While during the early de-
cades of the century their activities had an oldfashioned and rather
esoteric air, at mid-century a new generation of accomplished lis-
teners arrived which knew how to speak persuasively to the larger
public. Most important of all, they respected true professional stand-
ards of perfomance as their predecessors had not. After 1850
they became the dominant force among musical amateurs and
shaped concert life to their model. These connoisseurs did not put
up with any chatter in the concert hall.
One also cannot discount certain commercial motives behind the
rise of the masters in musical life. The virtuosi had driven hard
35 Edouard DELDEVEZ, Histoire de la Socite' des Concerts du Conser-
vatoire, Paris, 1887, passim.
36 Musical Record, June 24, 1845, pp. 53-54. These were the programs of
the concerts.
20 INTERNATIONAL
REVIEW OF THE AESTHETICSAND SOCIOLOGYOF MUSIC

bargains with publishers; they had been such hot properties that
music houses did not like to cross them and often granted them
surprisingly high fees.37 But the market was a chancy one, there
was a lot to be lost by poor investments, and reforms in copyright
laws had begun to limit publishers in some respects. By compar-
ison, publication of works by dead composers had lower cost,
greater stability, and fewer attendant problems. Many of the pub-
lishing houses had close ties with the major symphony orchestras
and probably exerted some influence in the shift in programming.
By the 1870's there was indeed an active suspicion of new music
in concert life. In 1887 the conductor of the Societe des Concerts
meditated upon the past and the future of his orchestra: >Can it
not today conserve its title of glory, follow the mission of the last
fifty years; can it not continue to devote itself to the cult of great
art, to the masters of the masters, without excluding the moderns,
the contemporary members of the young school?<<38His last point
was more than a bit disingenuous, since he had just finished chiding
most of the composers of his day for not following the path of the
masters. Recent composition had become a tenuous subordinate
within the new classical mass culture. This did not happen simply
because people >>disliked((new music; it was rather because the
very definition of musical culture now acted against it. Professor
Peter Gay has shown in a recent lecture that Johannes Brahms was
attacked for over-intellectuality throughout the last decades of his
life.39The value for learning thus had its limits; it all depended on
what was to be learned.
Two new worlds of present-oriented popular music now appeared
as a counterpoise against the hardening conservatism of classical
concert life. Operetta halls were one leading scene; the song fests
at Parisian cafes and London music halls were another. The latter
two, in fact, constituted early forms of the modern nightclub. By
1870 one can indeed say that the modern categories of popular and
classical music had come into place. Popular music was whatever
people said you did not need to know much to enjoy; classical
music was whatever they said you did need a serious acquired taste
to appreciate. Only the opera was still regarded in the old manner,
as music about which you did not need to known much, but it was
nice if you did.
37 Joel
SACHS, >,Authentic English and French editions of Johann Nepomuk
Hummel<, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1972, 25, p. 210.
See also SACHS, )>Hummel in England and France: A Study in the Inter-
national Musical Life of the Early Nineteenth Century<<,Dissertation, Colum-
bia University, 1971.
38
DELDEVEZ, op. cit., p. 285.
39 Lecture, University of California at Los
Angeles, November 5, 1975,
>Reflections on Modernism: Or Aimez-vous Brahms?c
MASS CULTUREAND EUROPEANMUSICALTASTE 21
The rise of musical mass culture and the elevation of the classical
masters thus emerged during the nineteenth century in close rela-
tionship to each other. It would be foolish to say that either one
caused the other. What happened between them was rather a sym-
biotic thing: the growing impersonality of the concert world made
possible a special reverence for dead composers; in return, the
ceremonial aspects of classical taste provided a grand new means
for public spectacle. That was what ultimately drew them together
- the need of the new industrial society to manifest its economic
and cultural potency through its own grand rites of secular reli-
giosity.

Sazetak

MASOVNA KULTURA I PREOBLIKOVANJE EVROPSKOG GLAZBENOG

UKUSA U RAZDOBLJU OD 1770. DO 1870. GODINE

Masovna kultura u evropskom glazbenom zivotu nije se pojavila u 20, vec

19. stoljedu. Masovna je kultura bila temeljna snaga koja je transformirala
evropski glazbeni ukus u njegovim fundamentalnim pretpostavkama. Tradi-
cija klasi6ne i tradicija zabavne glazbe proizvodi su suvremene glazbene ma-
sovne kulture.
Radna je definicija masovne kulture, koja se upotrebljava u povijesne
svrhe, u tome da je treba shvatiti kao izvedbu ili Sirenje glazbe na nacin
koji ne po6iva na osobnim odnosima izmedu glazbenika i publike, i u okviru
kojeg je zadobivanje, u stvari manipuliranje siroke publike prvotni cilj.
Premda se kvantitativna ljestvica glazbene masovne kulture 19. stoljeca ne
moZe usporediti s onom iz 20. stoljeca, bezlicnost koncertnih dogadaja i ma-
nipulativna sredstva izdavacke industrije bila su u osnovi istog karaktera
tada kao i danas. Masovnu kulturu ne bi trebalo shvatiti samo kao puki broj
ljudi koji idu na koncerte ili kupuju ploCe ili muzikalije, vec kao osobitost
glazbenog iskustva specificnog za modero urbano dru?tvo.
Evropska je izdavacka industrija tako inicirala masovnu kulturu u gla-
zbenom zivotu pri kraju 19. stoljeca putem tehnoloskih inovacija i vjeStim
metodama prodaje. Glazba s ploca bila je kljucna za razvitak. Sirenje glazbe
time se promijenilo od neposredne osobne distribucije u razgranati medu-
narodni sistem. Instrumentalni su virtuozi imali glavnu ulogu u novom si-
stemu jer su se pomoCu njih razvile nove prodajne metode koje su najavile
suvremeni fenomen glazbenog bestselera.
Ovaj je razvitak temeljito preobrazio evropski glazbeni ukus. Prvobitna
pretpostavka glazbenog ukusa u 17. i 18. stoljecu bila je otmjeno uvjerenje
da su znanje i ozbiljan interes za glazbu bili pozeljni no ne i nuzni za razu-
mijevanje glazbe. >Nije potrebno da znate mnogo<, govorili su, >no zgodno
je ako je tome tako.< Uspon glazbene masovne kulture slomio je taj poli-
morfni skup vrijednosti. Otkad su se procesi proizvodnje glazbenih aktivno-
sti siroko razvili i postali ekonomski snazni, lakoumnost i ozbiljnost rastali
su se u glazbenom zivotu i svaki od ta dva aspekta postao je temeljem od-
vojenog glazbenog svijeta. Do tridesetih godina 19. stoljeca razvile su se
potpuno nezavisne glazbene institucije za ?ozbiljnu< simfonijsku i komornu
22 INTERNATIONAL
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glazbu s jedne a virtuoznu i opernu glazbu s druge strane. U prvoj se pret-

postavljalo da se nesto mora znati, dok se u drugoj gotovo preferiralo ako se
nije znalo.
Nove klasicne institucije nisu bile nista manje proizvod masovne kulture
nego zabavne. I sam pojam >majstora<< pripadao je masovnoj kulturi; klasicni
je glazbeni zivot sada uzdizao iste likove putem izdanja koja su niknula iz
masovne kulture. Simfonijski su orkestri usavr?ili nove nacine sviranja za
novo trziste, premda na manje ?aren nacin nego salonska glazba. Ova bi
tvrdnja mogla oboriti klasicne predodzbe mnogih ljudi, no valja je priznati
ukoliko se zeli razumjeti povijesna uloga >klasicnog?ukusa.