The word’s origins are uncertain, but like ‘concerto’ it may derive from the Latin concertare (‘contend, dispute’) and consortium (‘society, participation’), although it may also be linked with the primary Italian meaning of concertare (‘to arrange, agree, get together’) and the English ‘consort’. It came into use in the 17th and 18th centuries to denote contexts where people performed music together. Until the middle of the 19th century, ‘concert’ could mean either private or public occasion, in a home or in a hall. Mozart, for example, often spoke of a ‘Konzert’ in his letters to describe evenings of informal, domestic music-making where all present were performers. Since about 1840 the term has been used only for public and non-theatrical events, but in a wide variety of contexts, both formal and informal. In the middle of the 20th century the term was extended to presentations of jazz, rock and popular music generally.
4. The 19th and early 20th centuries.
6. The spread of concert life.
WILLIAM WEBER
By definition, the modern concert makes music the centre of social attention. This was an innovation, since until the 17th century music was presumed to accompany another social activity; simply to listen to music, on a formal and regular basis, was unusual. The concert thus differs fundamentally from ceremonies or services and from entertainments where the role of music is auxiliary. In early English concerts, ‘For the first time an audience gathered to listen to music as such – a public of music lovers to which anyone who was propertied and educated was admitted’ (Habermas, 1962). Roger North made a similar point in The Musical Grammarian (c1728): ‘But how and by what steps Music shot up into such request, as to crowd out from the stage even comedy itself, and to sit down in her place and become of such mighty value and price as we now know it to be, is worth inquiring about’.
Nevertheless, serious listening had existed before the rise of formal concerts, most prominently in churches and in courts. While music is the focal point of a concert, that does not necessarily mean that an audience obeyed an etiquette of complete silence and stillness. Informal social practices continued in some concerts, for example in tavern performances in the 18th century, at ‘promenade’ concerts in the 1830s and 40s and more recently, and at band concerts during the 20th century. A strict social etiquette became the norm in concert life around the middle of the 19th century, linked closely to the new aesthetic of the time.
Concert performance of full-length opera has bridged the two major areas of musical life, though only occasionally during the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, Handel performed Imeneo during his trip to Dublin in 1741 and Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito was given at the New Rooms, Hanover Square, London, in 1810. The Società Filharmonica of Milan presented several operas, including in 1835 Rossini’s La Cenerentola, with Verdi at the keyboard. During the 20th century concert performance has become more common, done chiefly to revive works that are not part of standard repertory, or in association with a recording, or in circumstances where staging would be economically or physically prohibitive.
The concert first appeared in parts of Italy, Germany and England during the 17th century and by 1800 was a basic component of musical life in almost all European and American cities. During the 19th century some concert institutions evolved into a ritual of a lofty, spiritual nature that became central to civic and cultural life. By the end of the 20th century concerts had spread all around the globe, taking root particularly firmly in certain Asian countries, notably Japan and India.
The concert developed out of informal occasions where music co-existed with other social activities. Courts offered music after dinner; taverns sponsored musicians in their rooms; cathedrals featured works by master composers in services where the music was on view. Concerts emerged from such performing traditions in a gradual process during the 17th and early 18th centuries.
An important early concert series took place in Lübeck during the 1620s and 30s. Called the Abendspiel, later Abendmusik, it was an hour’s performance following evensong, first in the small Marienwerkhaus, then in the Rathaus, in Advent and at the end of Trinity. Although the performance followed the service, it was defined as a separate event and by 1700 chorus and orchestra were sometimes involved. The audience was made up chiefly of merchants who came to town for the main market of the week. Similar kinds of concert subsequently developed in other cities in Germany and Switzerland.
In Italy oratorio performances arose in the same period, forming part of Counter-Reformation endeavours to revivify the church. Such concerts separated out from liturgy gradually, for their early examples in Rome and other cities formed part of services or were accompanied by a sermon, held chiefly on Fridays and Sundays during Lent. Sometimes special chapels (‘oratories’) were built. From the start, oratorios were the special resort of the best performers and the most learned amateurs, and by the end of the 17th century they were no longer linked to sermons or liturgy. The genre came to resemble opera closely.
England led in the development of secular, commercial concerts, which originally took place in taverns and public rooms. Concerts flourished in London because the political instability between the 1640s and the 1730s kept the government from enforcing monopolies over non-theatrical music. The collapse of court and church music during the Civil War and the favouring of French music after the Restoration led musicians to give public concerts; listeners were charged a fee for regular events, an outgrowth of the long practice of offering gratuities to performers. Such events seem to have developed as early as the 1650s in Oxford and the 1660s in London, where the most prominent such musicians were Ben Wallington at the Mitre Inn in 1664 and John Banister in his rooms in 1672. The York Buildings, established in 1676 near Charing Cross, became the most important concert venue. Probably the most celebrated series of concerts took place in the rooms of the prominent coal and book dealer Thomas Britton in Clerkenwell until his death in 1714. The most important commercial concerts, the model for efforts elsewhere in Britain, was the series begun by C.F. Abel and J.C. Bach in 1764 and administered by others, most prominently the Earl of Abingdon, up to 1793, as well as the Salomon and Professional concerts of the early 1790s for which Haydn wrote his London symphonies.
The most common type of concert during the 18th century was given by a local music society. Called either society, academy or collegium musicum, these clubs were made up chiefly of amateurs, but their musical direction usually came from professionals who worked variously as church musicians, music teachers or dancing-masters. The organizations usually grew out of groups of players who had met informally. During the 17th century they began constituting themselves as societies and holding public concerts, and in some cases they evolved into professional ensembles in the 19th century. The earliest incorporated were those in Frankfurt in 1713 and in Hamburg, under Telemann’s direction, in 1723. In Paris the principal ensembles of this kind were the Concert des Amateurs (1769) and the Concert de la Loge Olympique (1780). The academy that had the longest prominent such history became the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Having begun on an informal basis by 1700, it drew its members chiefly from the university and its musical head from the Thomaskirche; in 1743 it was named the Grosses Concert, in 1781 it was constituted as a series of public concerts, and by 1850 all its players were professionals.
While generally the players included only men, by the early 18th century a few women participated, and many attended public events. The societies were not strictly bourgeois in their members or their publics, since many of them drew landholders and better-educated craftsmen. The best-known societies appeared in north and central Germany, especially in Hamburg, Lübeck and Leipzig, but music societies were also strong in Switzerland, Bohemia, Austria and Scandinavia. During the 18th century they sprang up in many parts of Britain and France. The Académie de Musique established in Nantes in 1727, for example, not only held public concerts, but also performed at the installation of the mayor and the procession to the cathedral on its saint’s day.
The music societies were second only to courts as a network by which new works circulated around Europe. Performances by court musicians gradually shifted into concert halls within large cities. During the 18th century the personal rule of monarchs gave way to bureaucratic structures and public political activity, and urban institutions began to replace palaces as the focus of social and cultural life among the upper classes. Concerts were given by various combinations of amateurs and professionals, depending on the size and quality of court music establishments.
The founding of the Concert Spirituel in Paris in 1725 was a milestone in the shift of court musicians from Versailles to Paris resulting from the waning of court life after the 1680s. The series existed by virtue of a licence from the Académie Royale de Musique permitting concerts to be held on the 34 holy days when theatre performances were forbidden. The concerts were justified ecclesiastically by the performance of choral motets by Michel-Richard de Lalande and his successors at the court. Most of the repertory was secular – instrumental works, solo and ensemble, and opera airs, many of them Italian – and the motets were abandoned during the 1760s when they came to be regarded as antique in style. The Concert Spirituel became the nation’s central concert series, offering the most recent vocal and instrumental works by leading Italian and German as well as French composers. It controlled all other concert activity in the city on a monopolistic basis until its abolition in 1791. When the term ‘Concert Spirituel’ was borrowed in Madrid, Vienna and Moscow (among other places), the repertory was more consistently sacred.
German courts began opening their concerts to the public in the last two decades of the 18th century. The widow of Frederick the Great did so after his death in 1787, and Friedrich Wilhelm II and his successors continued that policy. The Bavarian court did the same in 1784, beginning a series of subscription concerts to which both nobles and bourgeois were admitted, and where works by Mannheim composers such as Christian Cannabich dominated the repertory. Parks, which were also being made public, began to serve as concert locales; in the duchy Burgsteinfurt in Westphalia, for example, events were held on Sundays in the summer from 1775 to 1806. In most cases performers were both amateur and professional.
The benefit concert was one of the most important types of concert activity between the late 17th century and the early 20th; in the period between 1780 and 1860 it was more numerous in many cities than any other type. Called by a variety of names (Akademie in German-speaking areas), the benefit derived from the practice in the theatre by which a major performer obtained the revenues from one performance a season. Such a concert was sponsored by a musician, generally no more than once or twice a year, for his or her profit or loss, and concerts intended to raise money for charities often had similar design. The patrons of the sponsoring musicians, at whose homes he or she had taught or performed, were expected to buy tickets and perhaps to attend.
A benefit concert always presented a variety of performers, both vocal and instrumental, usually with an accompanying ensemble, and often featured a performer of greater fame than the sponsor. As such, the benefit differed fundamentally from the Recital, since performing alone or with only an accompanist was virtually unknown until the late 1830s. The programmes at benefit concerts tended to be made up chiefly of numerous short works, focussed on opera selections and virtuoso numbers. Sonatas, chamber works and music of a serious nature were rarely heard at these events except in concerts offered by more learned performers.
Touring musicians put on similar kinds of concert. A performer would arrive in a town armed with letters of recommendation to musicians and amateurs of note, and by this means would be helped to find a hall, obtain performers, print a programme and attract an audience. This was the procedure adopted by the Mozart family during their travels. In his autobiography Spohr illustrated particularly well how this was done in the first decades of the 19th century.
The practice of publishing music through subscription was adapted by musicians to concert-giving. A prominent performer or a society would sell a series of concerts as a package, with payment expected before the first event, an arrangement widely prevalent throughout the major European countries. Most local musical societies operated on this basis. An important subscription series was that put on by J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel in London in 1765. Individually managed subscription concerts then led to collaborative undertakings; the Concert of Ancient Music (1776) and the Professional Concert (1785) were administered similarly by boards of gentlemen. The orchestral societies of the 19th century grew directly from these practices.
During the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, there were performances in aristocratic or bourgeois homes that verged upon being public concerts. It was common for musicians to perform in salons and the music was in some cases the focus of the occasion. In the late 18th century noted connoisseurs – Baron Alvensleben in London, Baron van Swieten in Vienna and Alexandre Le Riche de la Pouplinière in Paris, for example – put on regular salon concerts at which new or visiting performers were evaluated. Between the 1820s and the 1840s musicians put on concerts in the homes of major patrons, advertising in the press and charging visitors for tickets.
Before the mid-19th century concert programmes usually consisted of a series of short items set in a clearly defined order. Programmes tended to be longer than was normal later, and sometimes included individual movements taken from larger works; but they derived from consistent practices of musicianship. The basic principle was variety, the need to alternate genres, types of performer and vocal with instrumental. Practices tended to be strict in this regard: it was rare for two arias for soprano or two symphonic works to be given in immediate succession (fig.5). The Gewandhaus concerts, for example, followed a format of genres strictly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: each half of the programme would offer an overture, an aria, a solo instrumental number and finally a vocal or choral finale, either from opera or oratorio.
Vocal music held pride of place, as in musical culture generally during the 18th century. Programmes made up solely of instrumental works were unusual, and in most cases given only because of a lack of adequate singers. Nevertheless, instrumental idioms grew in prominence within concert repertories during the 18th century, as the Italian concerto and the German symphonic genre grew in scale and became increasingly popular. In Britain, for example, concerti grossi by Corelli, Geminiani, Handel and Avison were heard at all musical societies. The growing prominence of instrumental music brought higher expectations for performing ability within both societies and courts. In some cases (in Edinburgh in the 1790s and Boston in the 1820s, for example), societies were hurt seriously by conflict over preference for amateurs and professionals.
One major innovation in 18th-century concert life was the practice of performing old works in substantial numbers. While older works had persisted in the repertories of some churches for a century or more, they were not seen as a common repertory and there was indeed no term of denomination for them. England took the leadership in this area around 1700 with the invention of the term ‘ancient music’, first for music of the 16th century and then, by 1776, for any works more than about 20 years old. The Academy of Ancient Music, founded in 1726, performed a rich and unique repertory dominated by Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Marenzio and Purcell, as well as Handel and Pepusch. In 1776 the Concert of Ancient Music offered a more recent repertory that was focussed on works by Handel but also included music by Corelli, Geminiani, Avison, the Elizabethan masters and a variety of English and Italian composers.
Much more limited, but still significant, tendencies appeared elsewhere during the 18th century. In France the motets of Lalande and his successors, especially Mondonville, survived until the 1760s in programmes of the Concert Spirituel, as did the operas of Lully at the Opéra. In Germany, C.H. Graun’s passion Der Tod Jesu, first performed in Leipzig in 1755, remained in the repertory with a prominence comparable to that of Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate in England.
Handel reshaped the Italian idiom of the oratorio for performance in the theatre and did not depart from such locales. A performing tradition grew up around his oratorios, odes and masques that had roots within services begun in the early 18th century at cathedrals and churches to raise funds for charities, especially hospitals. Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate was performed widely in the first half of the 18th century, most prominently at the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy in St Paul’s Cathedral. Handel’s settings of the Te Deum, and then in the 1750s his other choral works, appeared at the annual festivals in the cathedral cities, first in public halls and by the end of the century in churches. Oratorio concerts were established in almost all major cities in Britain by the 1790s and included Haydn’s Creation in their repertories soon after its first performance in 1798. Relatively few composers took up the oratorio until the mid-19th century, and a limited number of Handel’s works were performed after his death, chiefly Messiah, Judas Maccabaeus, Alexander’s Feast and Acis and Galatea. But excerpts from a wide variety of his works appeared often on concert programmes.
Performing Handel’s oratorios spread all around the Western world by the end of the 19th century. The first performances outside Britain were in Vienna, where the Tonkünstler-Societät performed Judas Maccabaeus in 1779 and other works in the late 1780s and 90s. Early Handel events in Germany were in Berlin in 1786, Halle in 1803, Thuringia in 1810 and Elberfeld in 1817; these last evolved into the Lower Rhine Festival, at which Mendelssohn conducted between 1833 and 1847. The first major American institution of this kind, the Handel & Haydn Society, was founded in Boston in 1815. The first in France was the chorus of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire from the inception of the series in 1828.
The concert world underwent an upheaval during the first half of the 19th century because of the drastic expansion of its commercial bases. Along with the social changes of the time, the invention of lithography, the improvements in pianos and other instruments, the building of larger halls and opera houses and the development of aggressive marketing and sales techniques led to an outpouring of music designed to attract a much larger public than before. Much of the music consisted of virtuoso numbers and medleys from the best-known operas, works from which excerpts were performed by virtuosos in concerts and salons and then adapted for amateurs to play or sing at home. In the process the concert world took on capitalistic institutions on a far larger scale than before. Learning from piano manufacturers and publishers, Liszt and Paganini made fortunes on their concert tours, as did the most important later performers.
(x) Social broadening: bands and choruses.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
Virtuoso performance increasingly became the centre of attention in concert life. In the playing of such men as Hummel, Paganini, Thalberg, Liszt and Chopin, soloists with idiosyncratic music personalities captured the attention of audiences at a more intensive level than their predecessors had. Between 1828 and the end of his career in 1834, Paganini achieved an unprecedented public exposure by repeatedly filling opera houses in London, Paris and other cities. In 1831, for example, he gave 18 concerts in London, 49 in the English provinces, 23 in Scotland and 22 in Ireland. Liszt took on equally arduous, better planned concert tours between 1839 and 1847, from Scotland to Moscow to southern Italy; his relationships with his manager Gaëtano Belloni and his publisher Maurice Schlesinger presaged modern concert management.
The programmes performed by these and other virtuosos grew out of the conventions of the benefit concert, enlisting other musicians so that they might offer a varied musical fare (fig.6). Opera excerpts were central, alternating with virtuoso numbers, themselves often medleys of songs from a recent opera. The recital by a single solo performer (see Recital) did not become a common practice until the 1850s. While Liszt began performing alone in 1837, musicians such as Charles Hallé who defined the recital as a musical institution focussed their attention on classical works far more than the virtuosos active before 1850.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
The most important new institution established throughout Europe and America in the 19th century was the professional orchestra. Usually made up of the best players in each city, often the first-desk players in the opera, the orchestras evolved out of pre-existing music societies or court concert groups, or from new organizations directed by the musicians themselves. Besides the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the most important ensembles developed in national capitals, usually founded and governed by musicians: the Philharmonic Society of London (1813), the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris (1828), the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna (1842) and the Berlin PO (1882). In the USA, the major orchestras, notably the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York (1842) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1881), were founded and directed chiefly by wealthy patrons.
Though orchestral ensembles are often called ‘symphony orchestras’, during the 19th century about half of any programme tended to be vocal music. Symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were usually played at the start or the end of programmes; though increasingly revered as models of great music, they were ultimately less popular than the arias and scenes from operas and oratorios that stood prominently in the middle of the programmes. Excerpts from operas by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini appeared at many orchestral concerts, and their names or busts often went up on the walls along with those of the revered Viennese composers. Until the very end of the 19th century, programmes resembled those of the late 18th in their large number of pieces and their relative length, as compared with practices of the 20th century. In London, the Philharmonic Society continued normally performing ten works or excerpts until the 1870s.
Nevertheless, orchestral concerts were the most important context within which there was a massive change in the repertory from contemporary music to classical. At the Gewandhaus concerts, for example, among the performances of all works (not simply individual pieces), the proportion by living composers declined from over 70% in the 1820s to little over 20% in 1870. By that time the proportion of performances of works by dead composers grew to over 50% at almost all orchestral concerts. What emerged was an international canon of great works, accepted all over Europe, quite different from the separate national repertories that had existed in the 18th century. The term ‘classical music’ was used throughout for this music. While the works of Mozart and Beethoven stood at the core of this repertory, many other composers were represented – Corelli, Gluck, Viotti, Cherubini, Weber and Spontini, for example, and in addition Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.
The classical repertory that emerged in concerts of the early and middle decades of the 19th century had strong continuity in unbroken performing traditions. There was little revival of music, since the great majority of works performed had remained in performance at least occasionally, or were related to some that had. Some ‘historical’ concerts were put on, however, most prominently by Fétis in Paris in the 1830s. During the 1870s music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods was brought back in many concerts, even by a cappella ensembles within orchestral concerts. By 1900 concert programmes had reached a form that was to be basic in many respects for the 20th century. With recitals, chamber music concerts and orchestral concerts increasingly separated, orchestras now performed shorter programmes of fewer works than before, in the most generic form, an overture, a concerto and a symphony. Vocal works became less common in orchestral programmes; singers and choruses now gave concerts more commonly on their own.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
The chamber music concert developed in close relationship to the orchestral concert, since the repertory was from the start focussed upon the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This repertory appeared in public concerts at an early date. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries duos, trios, quartets and quintets were performed within public concerts offering a variety of musical forces, from solo singers to orchestras. In Vienna, for example, from 1804 Ignaz Schuppanzigh led a quartet in the Augarten Concerts and the events of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. But from the 1830s, concerts took place that were focussed on smaller instrumental groups, called ‘chamber music’ or ‘musique de chambre’, most prominently in London, Paris and Berlin. Leaders of the most important ensembles were John Ella in London, Pierre Baillot in Paris and Karl Möser in Berlin.
Performed chiefly by more learned musicians, chamber music concerts had a specialized public. In London the Beethoven Quartet Society performed even the composer’s then little-known late works. Songs and piano pieces were nonetheless also often included; the Monday Evening Popular Concerts in London (1858) always had piano solos or songs, sometimes even sentimental ballads.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
The Handelian tradition of the 18th century expanded in the 19th into much more varied concerts and repertory. Not only did many composers now write in the idiom, but choruses participated with orchestras in performing diverse programmes of symphonic, operatic and choral works. Moreover, while in the 18th century choral concerts had usually been given by expanded church choirs, amateur choral societies of a secular nature now became numerous. The Männergesangverein in Vienna, for example, founded in 1843, was prominent among the German-language choruses that combined folk and art songs with oratorios. In Britain and America the glee club emerged from the earlier organizations for singing catches and madrigals.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
During the early 18th century concerts were performed in spaces designed to accommodate a variety of activities, chiefly meetings and balls, and normally holding no more than 300 people. In the middle of the century, halls designed specifically for concerts began to be built, usually with larger capacity. The Holywell Music Room, erected in Oxford in 1748, was designed for concerts, though still of a traditional size; the Hanover Square Rooms in London, built in 1775, could hold 600 people, as did the Concertsaal des Junghofes built in Frankfurt in 1756. In Berlin, the Concertsaal of the masonic lodge ‘Royal York’, built in 1803, held 1000 people, and the hall of the Sing-Akademie, put up in 1826, could accommodate 1200.
From the 1830s many concert halls were built and managed by piano manufacturers and music publishers, essentially for virtuoso and benefit concerts. Such firms as Erard, Pleyel and Herz constructed halls in Paris, and the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel played a similar role in Berlin and other German cities. During the late 19th century the London office of the Bechstein piano firm took the leadership in establishing halls in close conjunction with their shops and the management of touring performers. By the 1890s a pianist could easily engage a firm such as Bechstein to have instruments ready at each stage of a tour in Europe or America.
The concert halls established after the middle of the 19th century displayed the lofty role that concerts had come to hold in European cultural life. The most important was the Musikvereinsaal of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Constructed in 1870, it occupied a central place on the new Ringstrasse, the avenue made possible by the removal of the ancient city wall; as such, it was not simply a place of recreation but rather a major civic and national institution. Similar in prominence were the Royal Albert Hall in London (1871), the Zürich Tonhalle (1891) and the Jahrhunderthalle in Breslau (1900). The capacity of over 6000 at the Royal Albert Hall set a new scale in concert spaces. Numerous municipal halls were built throughout Europe and North America, largely for use as concert halls; and local orchestras too became sources of civic pride and identity. The classical 18th- and 19th-century repertory now stood as the core of musical taste, accepted more widely and firmly, and it demanded quiet and attentive listening. Orchestral concerts witnessed the rise of a new etiquette of silence and motionlessness among listeners; ‘One goes to the Conservatoire with religious devotion’, a French writer said as early as 1846, ‘as the pious go to the temple of the Lord’.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
During the 18th century a visitor to an opera or oratorio performance could purchase a wordbook. Notes on the works began to appear in wordbooks or in programmes during the 18th century, most prominently in Germany (see Salmen, 1988). In England Sir George Smart did the same for the Amateur Concerts in 1821 and John Ella in particularly extensive form for the Musical Union in 1845. Notes became standard at concerts in the second half of the 19th century. George Grove was a prominent and prolific English contributor of analytical programme notes, chiefly for the Crystal Palace from the 1850s; Donald Tovey’s notes, written originally for the Reid Concerts in Edinburgh, represent the classics of the genre.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
Concerts obtained their own impresarios during the late 19th century. Before 1850 musicians or businessmen had arranged concert tours only in isolated cases, since it was presumed that a touring performer would best handle all arrangements himself. The initial leadership for concert management came out of the advice given by instrument manufacturers and music publishers such as Maurice Schlesinger to the musicians with whom they worked. The star system begun during the 1830s, and the long, concentrated tours that it made possible brought in profits such as only opera singers had accomplished previously. By the 1850s managers had begun to organize concerts for touring musicians, most of all in England and America. By the 1880s concert agents had established a new kind of authority for themselves within the concert world, as the equivalent to the impresario in opera.
Albert Gutmann in Vienna and Hermann Wolff in Berlin were important early agents, controlling both the careers of major performers and the schedules of the leading concert halls. The railways were a key to their efforts; in 1884 Gutmann was able to bring the Meiningen court orchestra to Vienna for a series of concerts under Hans von Bülow. Such figures were not simply businessmen; Gutmann, for example, identified the promise of the young Artur Schnabel and obtained a patron for his education. By 1914 an international industry of concert management had developed.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
Child prodigies performed from time to time during the 18th century, but it is unlikely that many children attended concerts. During the early 19th century it became increasingly common for children to perform in public, as music teachers began to put on events for their students and pupils at the new conservatories were often only 14 or 15 years old. Mass singing programmes put these concerts on a much larger scale. In France, from the 1840s, the nationwide Orphéon put on festivals where 1000 children might sing. In Germany the early gymnasiums presented concerts: in 1847, for example, in Conradsdorf, Silesia, the local Kantor presented a ‘jugendliches Volksliederfest’. Concerts by adult players designed for children developed more slowly. There was a ‘Young People’s Concert’ in Cincinnati, Ohio, as early as 1858, but regular educational series (such as the Robert Mayer Concerts in London) arose chiefly in the early 20th century, most notably in New York, London and Vienna.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
During the second half of the 19th century the concert public expanded greatly within the middle and working classes. The main impetus to increased concert-going was the near-universality of the piano in middle- and upper-class homes, which by this time was spreading to less affluent groups. While the rage for virtuosos closely tied to domestic music-making died down in the 1850s, the continuing growth of musical education stimulated musicians to establish concerts for a much wider public.
New orchestral groups were established, to give concerts aimed at a public less affluent than those who attended the costly and fashionable series given by the leading ensembles. The most prominent of these new groups were the Euterpe Concerts in Leipzig (c1830), the Crystal Palace in London (1854) and in Paris three separate series – those of Jules Pasdeloup (1861), Edouard Colonne (1873) and Charles Lamoureux (1881). Vienna was strikingly late in acquiring a new orchestra, the Concert Orchestra of 1899.
Concert (ii), §4: The 19th and early 20th centuries
The band concert arose as an institution within concert life at this time, given impetus by the opening to the public of royal and aristocratic parks and the expansion of military bands during the Napoleonic Wars (see Band (i), III). Military ensembles brought a high level of musical professionalism to wind instruments; in England, for example, the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall trained army players many of whom later became principals in the best London orchestras. Band concerts acquired a social etiquette not unlike that of 18th-century concerts and opera houses, where casual social contact occurred even though music was the main focus of attention. The bandstand, which evolved in France during the Revolution, gave a distinctive architectural style to these occasions.
In many instances, band concerts developed into major cultural and social institutions. In the USA during the late 19th century the Marine Corps Band gave weekly performances at the White House, the military barracks and the Capitol; J.P. Sousa, who directed it from 1880 but left in 1892 to form his own band, was counted among one of the leading figures in the nation’s musical life. Bands performed repertory from both the opera and concert music; when Sousa took over, he was surprised to find that ‘here was not a sheet of Wagner, Berlioz, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, or any other of the modern composers who were attracting attention throughout the musical world’. By the same token, in such countries as France and the USA, major orchestras performed, indoors, marches composed originally for bands.
Choruses and bands brought into concert life people from the lower-middle and working classes who had formerly had little to do with it. From the 1830s music teachers in many countries brought music education to a wider segment of the population. By the end of the century most countries had choral or choral-orchestral festivals with large numbers of performers, who sang the better-known oratorios and an expanding repertory of new works. In France the Orphéon movement began in the 1830s, as a government programme of choral societies among workers; in Britain the Tonic Sol-fa movement was established. Equally important was the widespread founding of choruses, brass bands and even orchestras on local initiative. Most small cities and towns in the early 20th century had several such organizations, made up of people outside the upper or even the middle classes. Their activities were stimulated by competitive festivals.
The growth of such groups was particularly strong in industrial towns, especially in northern England and western Germany. Factory owners often helped foster cultural pursuits that might induce a happier work force, but the initiative came chiefly from the workers’ communities and does not seem to have sprung from emulation of the educated classes. Musical ensembles and the larger organizations around them became focal points of local life, but regional and national festivals and competitions grew up that made them well known nationally. Like the military bands, working-class ensembles performed transcriptions of opera overtures and symphonic works as well as popular songs and marches. In Germany and Austria, bands and choruses played active political roles, chiefly in the socialist movement; this happened less in England, although major unions had music societies that provided an important cultural unity within social gatherings of the union and the local community.
During the period between the Revolution of 1848 and World War II, concert life flourished: there was a relative continuity in repertory, taste and social locales within which there was some remarkable music-making in a public context. Cities tended to be close-knit and easily accessible, integral communities within which concert life served as one of the citizens’ main pleasures. This was underpinned by links between domestic and public music: many people played at home what they heard in halls. New music, though increasingly controversial and less and less performed on the whole, still was often given and entered into creative interaction with the classics.
Much of this changed in the later 20th century. Air travel, television, motorways and the opening up of new cultural media harmed some aspects of concert life while helping others. Some small communities that once sustained bands, choruses and orchestras disappeared or lost the musical focus of their cultural life. But the central feature – symphony orchestras performing a standard, well-defined repertory, chiefly of music from the Viennese Classics to the early 20th century, in large concert halls in the major cities – prevailed until the 1980s. Since 1945 the presence of new music within the generality of concert programmes and the taste of the public underwent a marked decline. Orchestral and chamber music concerts, in particular, came increasingly to draw on a repertory of the past in a way that only a few specialist organizations had formerly done.
At the same time, significant innovations came about in the second half of the century, most prominently in the realms of early music and new music. Further, the level of performance improved in general, because conservatories set increasingly high standards and because recording companies (whose activities underpinned the finances of many orchestras) made new demands of technical excellence.
It was as much an innovation to put on a concert exclusively of new music around 1900 as it was to put on one of old works alone in 1776. This new kind of concert sprang from the new avant garde that developed in music, as in other arts, at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1880s composers under the leadership of German Wagnerians began holding concerts devoted to new works and addressed specifically to the audience sympathetic to such music. Schoenberg helped Alexander Zemlinsky on an important such series in 1903 and then in 1919 established the Societät für Privat-Aufführungen, to which the press was not admitted. The International Society for Contemporary Music was set up by a more varied group of musicians in 1922.
Concerts devoted to new music became more widespread and significant within musical life after 1945. Funding for avant-garde works was provided by numerous organizations, most prominently state radio stations in Europe and universities in North America. Among the new music centres to develop were the Darmstadt Festival, the Donaueschingen Festival (Baden-Baden), the Domaine Musicale in Paris and the League of Composers in New York, as well as university programmes in several cities such as Princeton, New York, Buffalo, Chicago and San Diego.
Several new music concert groups that built substantial new publics outside the universities were those linked to other art worlds. John Cage exercised powerful leadership in this development, in Europe as well as in the USA. Here ‘concert’ no longer necessarily signifies the performance of integral, printed works before a silent, seated public, but rather the creation of what has been called a musical ‘environment’, where performers and perhaps listeners take part in shaping the music. Cage’s colleague David Tudor was a pioneer in using electronic sound and ‘found objects’ to design these experiences.
World War II was a watershed for early music as much as new music. Interest had arisen during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in music from before 1700, more among small circles of advocates than in the concert world. In England the main leader in the movement was Arnold Dolmetsch, who after holding an important concert in 1891 in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, offered performances chiefly in his home in Dulwich. Few of the early ensembles held regular public concerts, and the most prominent performers – the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, for example – tended to be singers or keyboard players with performing styles similar to traditional practices.
After 1945 the field benefited from easier travel, the expansion of the record industry, the interest of foundations in supporting concerts and the advance of musicological research. Leadership in mounting concerts of early music in the 1950s came chiefly from London, New York, Vienna and The Hague, as new instrumental and vocal ensembles began giving regular series of concerts and touring internationally. Noah Greenberg founded the New York Pro Musica in 1953, achieving a wide public new to medieval music with The Play of Herod (1958) and television appearances. Leading early ensembles in Europe were Musica Reservata, the Deller Consort, the Brussels Pro Musica Antiqua, the Prague Madrigal Group and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Among the performers who emerged in the 1960s were the harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, David Munrow (founder of the Early Music Consort of London), the eminent recorder player Frans Brüggen and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (head of Concentus Musicus of Vienna). By 1990 early music had become a major component of the concert world, with performers who often worked in new music as well. Historically aware performing practice and instrumentation has had a strong impact on concert life generally and in many cases mainstream performing groups have begun following the same principles.
The shift of jazz and rock music into concert settings between the 1930s and the 1950s marked an expansion in the range of concert activity. Idioms that had evolved in dance halls and nightclubs at first seemed foreign to the concert hall, because of the seemingly functional role of the music and casual manner of musical and social practices; but in each case the idiom changed in ways that made the term ‘concert’ seem appropriate. Such repertories had appeared periodically in concert halls before the 1930s, but presented chiefly as a curiosity. Between 1935 and 1945 first swing and then bebop became sought after by a new set of white aficionados and critics in the USA who argued the seriousness of the two idioms. The concert usually cited as the breakthrough for jazz was one given by Benny Goodman in Carnegie Hall, New York, on 16 January 1938; another major event was Eddie Condon’s performances of bebop at New York Town Hall in 1942, when his rhythmic sophistication attracted Peggy Guggenheim’s patronage. The shift into the concert hall continued with performances in Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, tours by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie during the 1940s and then those by Dave Mulligan, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet in the 1950s. In the 1960s college engagements opened up new possibilities for jazz concerts, and the closure of clubs in the 1980s and early 90s made jazz even more focussed upon the concert hall. Jazz concerts became numerous and prominent in Europe; festivals began as early as 1948 in Paris and 1953 in Frankfurt.
Rock music, like jazz, shifted from dance halls and nightclubs to the concert stage, but did so earlier in its evolution and with a greater focus on recordings and radio. Soon after the rise of rock in the early 1950s, the performers became so popular that they began putting on concerts in large halls, but the weakness of the sound effects compared with those on record or the radio limited the number of events. Elvis Presley was among those to overcome this problem with the theatrical nature of his presentations. Popular folk music took the lead in concerts along with rock, for Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and others began appearing at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl in the early 1960s. The arrival of the Beatles in 1964 greatly expanded the scale and the market for rock concerts, notably with the use of baseball stadiums. Their manner of presentation was nonetheless rooted in the nightclub in that they tended to wear a common outfit and use standard lighting. During the early 1970s Led Zeppelin expanded the use of light strobes, smoke, projections and fantastic, individualized costumes, techniques that San Francisco promoters had devised in dance halls such as the Fillmore Auditorium. During the 1980s heavy metal groups made such effects a major focus of their concerts.
The widening of public concert activity beyond its original bases in western Europe has occurred in conjunction either with population movements, touring musicians or diplomatic and cultural contacts. Concerts came to eastern Europe through touring musicians, originally singers or opera companies who from the middle of the 18th century were brought to courts and cities east of Berlin or Prague, and who also gave private performances. By the early 19th century in Moscow the court theatre held concerts on religious feast days, when opera and drama were forbidden, in the Assembly of the Nobility. Instrumentalists also were attracted to Russia: John Field and J.W. Hässler spent extended periods there. Liszt had a major impact in spreading concerts widely in eastern Europe in his tours of 1842–3 and 1847, travelling across Hungary, Romania, Russia and Turkey. Anton Rubinstein led in the establishment of the orchestral concerts of the Russian Music Society in 1860, and the Moscow PO was founded in 1883. By the same token, numerous musicians trained in such cities as Kiev and Odessa went to play in orchestras in western Europe and America.
In Latin America, musical life was focussed chiefly upon performances in churches, private homes and opera houses. But in most countries concert institutions followed during the early 19th century, becoming established, for example, in Buenos Aires (1822), Mexico City (1824) and Bogotá (1847). Concert tours to these countries grew at the end of the century in close relationship with the prominence of opera in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.
In North America, concerts came with the movement of population, at first most notably in Canada, where the music society, made up chiefly of amateurs, followed the English and French models. As early as the 1770s the Gentlemen’s Subscription Concerts was formed in Quebec; in 1818 the Harmonic Society was directed by Charles Sauvageau in Toronto. In Quebec the Société Symphonique de Québec, the first independent orchestra, was formed in 1903.
Concerts arose similarly in the colonies in the towns and cities, still quite isolated, where professional musicians earned their living more by teaching and selling music than by performing. In the 1830s and 40s the building of roads and railways stimulated the growth of concert life on a far greater scale. First British and then German performers built up ensembles and audiences and thereby came to work as performers on a full-time basis. The Germania Society, a touring ensemble of recent immigrant musicians, ended up establishing its members in careers along the East Coast. The scale of the country necessitated the early rise of business management of concert tours, on a much larger scale than in Europe, as can be seen in the travels of Leopold Meyer, Ole Bull and Jenny Lind.
Western concerts arrived in Japan after the resumption of foreign contact in 1843, chiefly through the invitation of musicians by the government. The first Western concerts in Japan were in parks by American, Russian or British brass bands. The Tokyo Music School, founded in 1879 as the Office of Musical Study and renamed in 1887 (now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), sponsored an orchestra that provided the focus of Tokyo musical life until the 1920s. A variety of American, British and German musicians were invited to train musicians and participate within concert life.
The principal orchestra in Japan was founded in 1927 as the New Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Hidemaro Konoe. Made up of professional players, it established the first subscription concert series in Tokyo. Joseph Rosenstock, who became conductor in 1936, expanded both public and repertory, performing more music from the Baroque and Classical periods and introducing such new works as Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 1939. In 1951 it became linked to the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) and was named the NHK SO.
Orchestral concerts grew to a much greater extent than did opera in Japan. The Tokyo SO was established in 1946; there are also prominent orchestras in such cities as Osaka and Kyoto. Concert life burgeoned later in the century; after the widespread construction of concert halls in the 1980s there were 1512 in use by 1990. In 1979 around 2000 classical music concerts were held; by the 1991–2 season, 8432 concerts took place, including 3792 in Tokyo and Yokohama (only one quarter by foreign ensembles). Traditions distinctive to Japan include the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the end of each year; it was given 158 times in the last six weeks of 1991.
Further information on concert life and history may be found under the relevant headings in city articles.
Concert (ii), §6: The spread of concert life
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T. Busby: Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes (London, 1825)
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J.H. Leigh Hunt: ‘The Fancy Concert’, Ainsworth’s Magazine (1845), Jan
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