The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (review)

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the eleven essays in The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914 examine the intersection of economics and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William Weber, the collection's editor, is careful to define his use of the term entrepreneur. In the seventeenth century, the term denoted the fulfilling of a business project at a fixed price, albeit at the entrepreneur's own risk, and many independent musicians who looked to manipulate the market were known as opérateurs or charlatans. By 1700 when individuals were no longer entirely dependent on the patronage of a single aristocrat or bishop, the notion of the freelance musician emerged. What becomes evident throughout this volume, however, is that musicians became skilled in the social dimension of promoting themselves and their art as much as in the financial sector.

The later definition of entrepreneur has always implied a co-relation between "musical opportunism" and the business acumen of an individual with an eye to "making a killing." But, as Weber explains, opportunism, often ephemeral in nature, did not necessarily lead to entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur was expected to outlay capital at his or her expense to take advantage of an unexploited area. Invariably this meant that an entrepreneurial musician would have to be skilled in the two-way process of dealing with businessmen (at the end of the eighteenth century the new patrons) and creating musical events—concerts, operas, musical tours—that the public (an increasingly new concept of patronage) would pay to hear and see. Nevertheless, as Weber cautions, we should not understand the evolution of musical entrepreneurship during the nineteenth century purely in polarised terms of the free market. Money-making was not always the prime goal, since certain "idealists" aimed for the development of taste—a notion propagated by the foundation of publishing companies, concert tours, and instrument making—over financial profit. This gave rise to a diversity of business ideals in which economic and cultural values intermingled. Weber's chapter is complemented by Richard Leppert's "The Musician of the Imagination," in which he argues that the nineteenth-century musician became a commodity both real and imagined, with figures such as Nicolò Paganini and Franz Liszt at the forefront. Leppert's conceptual study is driven by his specialist knowledge of iconography where images of musicians contributed to the wider visualisation of the profession as one that encompassed the entrepreneurial self-promoter, but also one that transgressed social norms and encouraged a new public fantasy of music and musical performance.

Tanya Kevorkian's case study considers early musical entrepreneurs and the changing environmental conditions of church music in Leipzig between 1699 and 1750; this essay serves as a constructive model in its use of political and economic criteria to underline the reasons for the augmentation in Leipzig's mercantile classes and how this ultimately provided fillip for the city's musical explosion in secular and, especially, sacred music. In "Selling the Serious," David Gramit explores a trope that developed in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century: that of the desire for the fashionable at the expense of the serious and enduring (a trope which continued to resonate throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). This sentiment emerged as a significant discourse among German-speaking music critics and was the focus of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, a periodical in which ideals of education and refinement were promulgated as a foil to the rapacious potential of the marketplace.

"Concert Management in the Nineteenth Century"—perhaps one of the keenest issues of nineteenth-century entrepreneurship—provides the thrust of the volume's third part. Weber plots the evolution from the self-managing musician to the independent concert agent. He shows that whereas early managers supervised virtually all elements of a concert tour—from the finances to the musical programming—by the end of the nineteenth century, any touring musician worth his salt would place the majority...