The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (review)

The title understates the case: there are multiple transformations at work in this book and a far wider spectrum of music than the 'Haydn to Brahms' subtitle might imply. Indeed, despite his focus on just four major centres (Leipzig, London, Paris, and Vienna), the scope of this history of professional concert programming is so challenging as to recall William Butler Yeats's 'balloon of the mind / That bellies and drags in the wind' and which must, somehow, be controlled (The Balloon of the Mind, New Statesman, 29 Sept. 1917). It is hardly surprising, then, that although Weber dates the book's conception to 2002, its contents are dependent on some thirty years of experience working on concert and operatic life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the major European capitals. Making sense of several thousand concert programmes—Weber's main primary source—is no mean task.

Weber has written a book that is almost as much about the rise of the non-canonic as about canon-formation itself. Structured in three chronological Parts: 1750-1800 (his preamble), 1800-48 (the pivotal or 'crisis' years), and 1848-75 (the hegemony of the classics, and sites of resistance to them), his account is illustrated throughout with over 100 examples of concert programmes, a dozen of them presented as plates. They in turn underpin discussion of concert practices as varied as the orchestral or quartet subscription concert, the virtuoso and benefit concert, the orchestral promenade concert, the opera gala concert, and the music hall/café-concert tradition. Finally, Weber provides an epilogue, based ostensibly on the situation around 1914 but which acts more generally as a way of highlighting the continuities he detects between the state of classical and popular musics in 1875 and in today's musical culture. Nested within this chronological framework lie thematic chapters, each offering a synoptic overview, an account of each city in turn, and brief concluding thoughts. Of these, chapter 3 is pivotal to the whole, since it provides the book's theoretical crux and outlines the 'idealist' cause for classical music via an elaboration of the work of Celia Applegate, Mark Evan Bonds, and David Gramit.

While such a clear lattice structure ought, in theory, to effect Yeats's desired control, it is symptomatic of the vitality and heterogeneity of the musical worlds Weber evokes that more often than not the chronology of his examples spills over from one Part to another. History up close is messy. It is perhaps for that reason that Weber's introduction lays out his core, macro-historical, thesis in such unambiguous terms—that the great 'transformation' of the nineteenth century was in fact a multi-phase and multi-faceted process in which a relatively cohesive late eighteenth-century practice of 'miscellany' concerts split into niche repertorial markets involving the separation and hierarchical arrangement of repertories, their purging from (or appropriation into) different musical contexts on ideological grounds, and some border skirmishes—resulting in a more or less antagonistic separation of popular and classical music within professional musical life by around 1875. Where the eighteenth century routinely accommodated different tastes within a single programme—mixing vocal and instrumental numbers and chamber, solo virtuoso, and orchestral genres—the nineteenth century saw the collegiality on which such miscellany depended become an impassioned struggle over the relative merits of different types of music and over who had the right to 'own' them. And where genres such as eighteenth-century tavern music were indeed kept separate from the music of professional concerts, the relationship did not involve similar degrees of hegemony or subordination. As is well known, much of the nineteenth century's 'classical' music was also old music, and it became increasingly difficult after Wagner to get 'new music' into the 'classical' framework; but for Weber, the position of opera (of whatever vintage) remained ambiguous since so much of it occupied the border territory...