Music played an important role in the social life of nineteenth-century Europe, and music in the home provided a convenient way to entertain and communicate among friends and colleagues. String chamber music, in particular, fostered social interactions that helped build communities within communities. Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvoøák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment. Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvorák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment. Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

This book explores the multi-movement Leipzig chamber works composed by Robert Schumann (1810-56). It adopts a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it shows how this repertory illuminates Schumann's response to certain past and contemporary composers; to his own youthful, experimental past; and to various literary and cultural influences. At the same time, the book explores how different people have heard this music: listeners in Schumann's own day and beyond, in both Germanic and non-Germanic regions, and comprising the voices of critics, performers, audiences, even figures in disciplines outside of music.

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity. The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany—from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.

Early nineteenth-century composers, publishers and writers evolved influential ideals of Beethoven's symphonies as untouchable masterpieces. Meanwhile, many and various arrangements of symphonies, principally for amateur performers, supported diverse and 'hands-on' cultivation of the same works. Now mostly forgotten, these arrangements served a vital function in nineteenth-century musical life, extending works' meanings and reach, especially to women in the home. This book places domestic music-making back into the history of the classical symphony. It investigates a largely untapped wealth of early nineteenth-century arrangements of symphonies by Beethoven - for piano, string quartet, mixed quintet and other ensembles. The study focuses on three key agents in the nineteenth-century culture of musical arrangement: arrangers, publishers and performers. It investigates significant functions of those musical arrangements in the era: sociability, reception and canon formation. The volume also explores how conceptions of Beethoven's symphonies, and their arrangement, changed across the era with changing conception of musical works.