The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities by Marie Sumner Lott (review)

Historians who try to eavesdrop upon everyday music-making are constantly thwarted by the patchiness of the documentary evidence. It is also unclear how much those meagre records can be taken as representative of wider tendencies. Marie Sumner Lott is all too aware that private performance is poorly documented; thus, at the opening of this study, she cautions that 'it is important to note what we can and cannot know and what we must infer from a variety of incomplete, sometimes contradictory sources' (p. 6). Her aim is to reinsert the middle-class musical amateur into our account of nineteenth-century string chamber music, and thereby to experience the central works of the repertory anew, as well as to shed light on its darker corners.

Recent years have seen various endeavours to explore informal music-making. The Listening Experience Database (http://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/), for instance, is an 'open and freely searchable database that brings together a mass of data about people's experiences of listening to music of all kinds, in any historical period and any culture'. Other studies shift the focus away from works to usage and meaning, such as Wiebke Thormählen's 'Lamenting at the Piano: Domestic Music-making and Well-being in Eighteenth-Century Britain' (Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, 15 (2014), 144–60); or, from a different historical era, Zoe Lang's essay, 'Creating a War Repertoire: Musik für Alle and Domestic Music during the First World War' (Journal of Musicological Research, 33 (2014), 206–40); or Marek Korczynski's Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance (Ithaca, NY, 2014). Still others take a central figure or body of repertory as their focus, such as Katy Hamilton's and my co-edited volume Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2014), to which Lott has contributed a chapter. In the context of Lott's study, Christina Bashford's geographically and temporally defined work on chamber music is highly relevant ('Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 291–359).

Lott draws on three types of documentary sources: the (sparse) personal accounts of private music-making; the scores of oncepopular chamber works (and the book is richly illustrated with music examples); and the publishers' records, which help to establish what music was sold and in what quantities. She establishes relationships and traces continuities between the repertory that dominates both concert platforms and scholarly discourse (Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvořák) and oncepopular works by such figures as Louis Spohr, Václav Veit, Carl Gottlieb Reissiger, Andreas Romberg, and George Onslow. She traces an altered landscape of nineteenth-century chamber music, in which the driving force of traditional historical writing—perceived innovation—is contextualized against a background of repertory designed to be 'pleasurable and collegial' to play (p. 73).

Over the course of seven chapters, Lott approaches her topic from various angles. The opening chapter focuses on three significant north-German publishers (Hofmeister, Peters, and Schlesinger), and considers marketing, pricing, and profits. Another looks at the nowforgotten repertory of operatic and folksong arrangements for chamber ensembles; Lott considers the ways in which stage works were sanitized for the home, revealing an underacknowledged corollary to the more famous practice of virtuosi performing operatic keyboard transcriptions for the concert stage. Both practices adapt a work to its new space, and contribute to its canonic status. Another chapter builds up a definition of 'domestic style' in composition, based on such features as large-scale repetition, the avoidance of difficult or remote keys, and the prioritizing of the 'pleasure of the performer' (p. 82). Chapter 4 shifts to a reappraisal of 'progressiveness' in late Beethoven, which shows how later composers such as Mendelssohn, Burgmüller, Schumann, and Berwald positioned themselves...