Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  As with print culture, the role played by patronage and official authority in regulating relations between visual artists and the public generated much criticism, expanding as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. A French critic of the 1780s wrote that

  Those who patronize artists, whether grandees or rich men, are entitled at the very least to have a say in the work they order. But however right and natural may be their determination to have their way, it has often thwarted the best will in the world and checked the impulses of genius … The mischief can only be undone by leaving the artist a free hand in the execution of his work, in all its parts.

  Friedrich Schiller insisted that “I write as a citizen of the world (Weltbürger), who serves no prince,” and the painter Jacob Carstens expressed a kindred sentiment in a letter to a Prussian minister, adding that his having received a pension from the Berlin Academy did not make him “a lifelong bondman” of it. In early nineteenth-century German cities artists formed societies to set up exhibitions of their own where they could present their work directly to the public, bypassing the narrow circle of aristocratic patrons. One Berlin painter involved in them excused himself for delaying work on a royal commission, explaining that he had first to complete some smaller works for the breitere Publikum, on whose interest and orders he was dependent “since your Majesty alone neither can nor will always employ me.” Private exhibition spaces similar to those organized by artists and dealers in England were advocated in France as an alternative or supplement to the official salons (for instance by the painter Théodore Rousseau) from the 1830s.12 At roughly the same time a writer in the French journal L’Artiste, Alexandre de Saint-Cheron, welcomed signs that the regime of patronage both official and private was giving way to market relations, since it was through them that cultural producers could address themselves directly to the public. Doing so freed artists from personal dependency, Saint-Cheron maintained, allowing them to develop their talents by speaking to and for society as a whole. Hence the artist who “expects to be paid only for his work and the free products of his genius” acquired a social position that was “more moral, more independent, and more able to favor the progress of art.”13 Attacks on the Salon system grew in the following years, fed by the burgeoning number of submissions and what seemed the arbitrary responses of juries to it. In 1855 Gustave Courbet, the most frank and outspoken artist of the time in his desire to present his work directly to viewers and be judged only by them, set up his own exhibition as a direct challenge to the one sponsored by Napoleon III’s government, and the famous “Salon des refusés” took place in 1863.

  The old habits had staying power, however. As late as 1874 the critic Théodore Duret advised Camille Pissarro against participating in the independent exhibition mounted by the impressionists on the grounds that only the Salon gave painters the recognition that led to success with dealers and the public, and in 1881 Renoir wrote to the impressionists’ dealer Paul Durand-Ruel that he doubted there were more than fifteen art lovers in Paris “capable of liking a painting without Salon approval.” By this time however, the art world was entering into a phase that corresponded to the “second revolution of the book” in publishing; of this development Durand-Ruel was one of the crucial agents, fashioning a system that would provide a new foundation for the aspiration to put the relations between artists and their audience on a basis free of traditional patronage relations.

  Durand-Ruel was moved by both self-interest and a desire to promote the careers of the painters he favored. His father had dealt with the Barbizon School of the mid century, and by the time Paul took over the business in 1865 there was considerable evidence that money could be made by investing early in talented artists’ careers; indeed a young and penniless Émile Zola, in the course of defending the still often despised Manet in 1867, declared that had he any money he would buy up “all his canvasses today. In fifty years they will be sold for fifteen or twenty times as much.” In 1872 Durand-Ruel did just what Zola had imagined, paying Manet the considerable sum of 35,000 francs for all twenty-three of his available pictures, a practice he soon extended to what was still called the “Batignolles School” of Renoir, Monet, Degas, and the others, assuring their survival while preparing substantial profits for himself. His desire to secure both his own profits and make his artists understood and appreciated by potential buyers found visionary expression in his other important innovation, seeking to form public taste by publishing exhibition catalogues in which competent critics discussed the new work’s innovations and value. As Armand Silvestre, author of the first catalogue in 1874 explained, the painters were submitting their work “directly to the public that makes reputations even when it seems only to submit to them, and which will not fail to turn away, someday, from those who are content to follow its taste, toward those who make an effort to guide it.”14

  The success of this project was noted throughout Europe, and by the 1880s and 1890s groups of artists in other countries were making similar efforts on their own, “seceding” from authorized venues to set up their own exhibitions, supported by dealers who enlisted critics to publicize and evaluate the work shown. In Vienna Gustav Klimt was a central figure in the Secession; in Berlin the movement was animated by the eminent dealer Paul Cassirer. The result was the creation of a public world of visual art, brought to existence not by officials who shaped it for the “higher” purposes of morality or the state, but by artists and their collaborators themselves (we will consider some of the aesthetic aims and consequences of these movements later on). There can hardly be a better example of a shift from teleocratic principles regulating relations inside a network on grounds established outside it to autonomous ones derived from the activities pursued inside the network itself. As in other instances, a transformation rooted in the eighteenth century found much fuller realization through the new conditions emerging after 1850.15

  Music

  The corresponding developments that gave a more tangible and public character to musical culture included a marked increase in the number of public concerts, an expansion in music publishing that made scores available to many more people and in standardized form, and the changed relationship between private musical spaces and public ones to which this growth in publishing contributed. These changes underlay a phenomenon Carl Dahlhaus identifies as critical to the new situation of music in the nineteenth century, namely the emerging sense of a stable past repertoire against which music of the present was compared and judged. All these developments clearly began before 1800 but picked up speed in the era of the Restoration, spurred on by the renown accorded to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.16 As with literature and art, the second half of the century would see a new and more fully developed stage in this process.

  Like museums, public concerts (as opposed to private occasions in the homes of well-off patrons) were largely a creation of the eighteenth century, achieving prominence especially in England, where they often featured foreign luminaries such as Handel and Haydn. But their numbers mushroomed only later, increasing threefold in London between the mid 1830s and the late 1840s and fivefold in Paris in the same years. Both the growth and the novelty were greater in Paris, because the Old Regime state had regulated and largely monopolized music performances, alongside opera and dance, through the Académie Royale de Musique (although a few ephemeral semi-public subscription concert series started up in the 1770s), and suspicion of popular gatherings continued to impede them until around 1800. The most important innovation of the first half of the century came through action by the Restoration government in 1828, just as the atmosphere that would lead to the Revolution of 1830 was heating up, when the regime provided money for a Concert Society associated with the Paris Conservatory, thereby instituting what the Journal des débats called “a musical revolution.” A slower growth was visible in Vienna, as in some smaller German cities where Kenner and Liebhaber organized public concerts, and in some capitals where princely theaters previously attended only
by courtiers and guests were opened to the public, foreshadowing later moves toward forms of musical life that allowed for still broader participation.17

  In this period, however, even public venues retained features rooted in private patronage. In Paris and London the most common kind of public concert was one dubbed a “benefit,” meaning not (as the term does today) that it was held in aid of some outside cause, but that it was put on to support the musician who organized it; he (occasionally she, but mostly for singers) solicited colleagues to participate (as they did in return), using the occasion not chiefly to profit from ticket sales, but to put his name before potential patrons who could provide “more lucrative private concerts and teaching contracts,” still the best source of income for most performers.18 The “benefit” concert’s mix of public and private orientations was present also in appearances by the great and wildly popular traveling virtuosos Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt, which generated large sums from ticket sales, but (like the tours of such earlier figures as Mozart) were still organized by the musicians themselves, through contacts with local patrons and colleagues, sometimes supported by aides whose relations to the soloists resembled servants more than later managers. Frédéric Chopin’s career was even closer to the earlier model, since he gave few public concerts, and “lived on his earnings as a teacher with an extensive practice among the wealthy, [and] by his performances at the private concerts of the rich”; the chief modern element in his case was that he also derived income from publishing his compositions. The often extravagant occasions when Liszt and Paganini appeared in public profited from the growing prestige of classical performance, but they also bore features of popular street and theater entertainment; at the same time some of Liszt’s concerts were more like salon appearances, given to small groups and with much socializing between the pieces. A popular spirit also marked the informal “promenade concerts” held first in Vienna and Paris and then in London from the 1830s; they attracted a mixed middle-class and worker audience but proved unable to become regular or permanent. Perhaps the most modern musical enterprise of the 1830s was the Paris Opera, run as a commercial undertaking by a self-consciously bourgeois entrepreneur and talented publicist, Auguste Véron, who drew in a large public by providing star-quality singers and dancers. But he often had to scramble to meet their demands and his success relied in part on a royal subsidy.19

  The more palpable public presence these phenomena imparted to musical life in the decades before 1850 was boosted by a remarkable expansion in publishing and distributing musical scores. Although music had long been available in printed form (usually from engraved plates), the press runs were small and the range of available pieces limited. The situation began to change from the mid eighteenth century as many of the publishing houses whose names remain familiar today were founded, especially in Germany, a development much aided by the development of new and more flexible forms of movable type (pioneered by Breitkopf in Leipzig), easing access to both present and past work. Much music still circulated in manuscript however, and some published pieces were dedicated to patrons whose role in musicians’ careers remained crucial, even to so widely acclaimed a figure as Haydn. The much greater expansion of printed music during the nineteenth century rested partly on the growing body of professional musicians, but probably more on students and amateurs, the latter chiefly responsible for the large place that music now assumed in the lives of families. According to one report there were only a dozen music shops in London around 1750, but 150 by 1824; between the same dates catalogues of available pieces exploded from a few pages to several hundred, and by the 1820s the publisher Boosey (today Boosey and Hawkes) listed 10,000 pieces from foreign printing houses alone. In 1834 a multi-volume “Musical Library” made its appearance in London, the publisher explaining that it was intended “to afford the same aid in the progress of the musical art that literature has so undeniably received from the cheap publications of the day.”20 Teaching aids were one significant component of this output, along with collections of songs and instrumental pieces, especially for the pianos that found their way into more and more middle-class homes from late in the eighteenth century.

  This growth in publishing supported private performances as well as public ones, but these took on a different relation to public concerts as the locales shifted from princely and aristocratic salons to middle-class homes. In both milieux performances were also social occasions where individuals and families could establish or develop connections, while simultaneously asserting claims to leadership in setting taste. For princes and aristocrats, however, public figures even in their private existence, musical occasions in their salons were self-contained; the notion that they might derive even some of their significance from reference to a less personalized musical world outside would seldom have been welcome to them. In bourgeois settings by contrast music played at home often had just such a reference, since those who engaged in it often saw it in relation to the expanding number of public concerts; symphonic reductions for solo or duo pianists were very popular, serving both as vehicles for learning about pieces people might not ever get to hear in a full version, or as preparation for listening to them if a nearby performance was in the offing. To be sure, music in middle-class settings served other purposes as well, particularly for young women, for whom being able to play the piano was seen as a help in finding a husband, allowing girls to exhibit themselves and their accomplishments in an acceptable way on social occasions (especially since piano-playing did not involve the kind of bodily display connected with string or wind instruments, more often taken up by boys and men). Some middle-class daughters saw wider possibilities in music, taking such (rare) examples as Clara Schumann as inspiration for imagining an independent career; as with writing, it was a hope that few could realize (save as teachers), and most bourgeois families were at best ambivalent toward it (as they were toward sons with similar ambitions), but the prospect left its mark. Both in its relationship to concert-going and in the expectations that it could provide advantages to daughters, middle-class musical life drew sustenance from the more visible public world of music in connection with which it developed, a world tied together and animated by discussion in journals and reviews. So important to musical life was the role played in it by “the central public medium of the bourgeoisie, the press,” that Carl Dahlhaus concludes that modern musical culture “might even be defined as music culture under the conditions of ‘bourgeois publicity.’”21

  In music too, however, the decades just after 1850 marked a palpably new phase in the relations between cultural producers and their public. What William Weber characterizes as the “free-wheeling” manner of the 1830s and 1840s with the continued importance of patronage, private performances and “benefit concerts,” now began to disappear into “firmer and less speculative structures.” Performers and composers themselves ceased to be the main organizers of their own concerts, as professional managers and agents began to appear from the 1870s, spreading to many cities in the next decades, and creating stable relations between players and their audiences much like those that Durand-Ruel and his imitators did for painters. “By 1900 almost every concert program in London, Paris, Berlin or Vienna denoted the concert agency that had arranged it.”22 A parallel development was the establishment of stable and more professional orchestras; the 1850s saw the founding of such ensembles in a number of cities, including Vienna and New York; a good illustration of the differences they made is provided by the northern English industrial cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. As Simon Gunn notes, a lively musical life existed in these places before the mid century but it was sporadic and unorganized. “The idea that music existed as an art in its own right, disassociated from religious or social ends, appears to have been held only by a minority of devotees”; in that period, as a Manchester paper later recalled, the hall where “Gentlemen’s” concerts took place resembled “rather a fashionable lounge than a society for the enjoyment or cultivation of music.�
��

  Central to making this distinction clear was the arrival in Manchester of a figure who was at once a musician and a musical entrepreneur of a modern type, Charles (originally Karl) Hallé. Taking over the orchestra in 1849, he became not just its conductor but its proprietor, and it still bears his name. A passionate advocate of Beethoven and an important force in making his music known in England, especially outside of London, he began his Manchester career by firing most of the musicians on the roster and replacing them with better-trained and better paid ones. To support the expense of his improved orchestra he sought to maximize revenues by selling programs, instructional manuals and sheet music. But the aim was to assure the material health of the ensemble, not just to make profits, and was to this goal that the Hallé Society he set up with the aid of prominent local citizens was dedicated. All this made Hallé himself an object of the increasing veneration accorded conductors in this period (Mendelssohn had been an early object of this attention, but it now spread more generally), and which was one reason for the expanded attention given concert music in the press. Public commentary on music grew from the 1840s, with the appearance of the London-based Musical Times and the Birmingham Musical Examiner, but beginning in the 1860s all the Manchester papers had critics and during the next decade the Guardian’s morning edition published program notes for music to be performed in the evening. Concerts remained social occasions to be sure, with whole families arriving dressed to be seen on opening nights and ticket prices set at levels that assured the audience would be primarily middle-class; but the availability of seats for a shilling meant that some better-off artisans and workers could attend and accounts describe some of them as regular concert-goers. A similar evolution of musical life occurred in Birmingham and Leeds, but organized by the citizenry rather than any counterpart to Hallé. Clearly music never became wholly independent of other public and private purposes in these places (in Birmingham and Leeds some concert revenues were used to support charitable causes), but as Gunn notes the new organizational forms were “instrumental in carving out a public realm for art.”23