Introduction

String Chamber Music and Its Audiences

in the Nineteenth Century

On a chilly winter evening in Berlin, a group of men sits in a candle-lit room

playing a string quartet. They are joined by a middle-aged woman dressed in
black, who sits as close as possible to the ensemble in a comfortable upholstered
armchair. She looks down and keeps her body still, leaning her cheek on her
hand; she is mesmerized by the music she hears, giving it her full attention,
perhaps closing her eyes to shut out distractions. The room is a large one with
high ceilings, tastefully and expensively decorated with fine wallpaper, paint-
ings, and draperies. Near the top of the walls, a series of marble busts have
been installed, peering down at the room’s inhabitants. At the edges of the
room, tables and chairs have been placed at a respectful distance, and more
onlookers and listeners sit there, also giving their full attention to the quartet.

Earlier in the day, in Frankfurt, a similar group of men gathered to play a string
quartet. They, too, sat in a well-appointed room surrounded by fine fabrics,
carpets, paintings, and bibelots. Their room was somewhat smaller, cozier even.
At the center of the space a four-sided music stand—that particular piece of
furniture that denotes that a true music lover lives here—stood at the ready
with the parts opened. The four gentlemen, now seated in their places, looked
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to the violinist, who, with one quick motion, breathed in sharply and placed
his bow on the string.

On the surface, these two scenes, common enough in the nineteenth century to be
immediately recognizable from a variety of paintings, drawings, or descriptions in
novels and stories, describe two iterations of the same type of occasion: a domestic
performance of string chamber music in an upper-middle-class home. But upon
further consideration, two very different events may be inferred from the visual
cues described. In the larger room, the high-art and culture signifiers in the form
of classically inspired busts and, most importantly, the presence of a select audi-
ence give the impression of a concert-like event in a private space. The image

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 2 Introduction
described is figure 0.1: Carl Johann Arnold’s watercolor Quartettabend bei Bettina
von Arnim from 1856, which depicts the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim and his
quartet playing at the home of Arnim (née Brentano), the respected Romantic
poet and author. It exemplifies the sort of “semiprivate” performance that was
common in the nineteenth century, a holdover from the previous century, when
aristocrats like Arnim would hire or invite professional musicians to perform for
their friends and families. In the later era, these semiprivate events served multiple
purposes, including as rehearsal trials for public performances and opportunities

Figure 0.1 Carl Johann Arnold, Quartettabend bei Bettina von Arnim (1856).
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum with
Goethe-Haus, Freies deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt am Main, Germany / Lutz
Braun / Art Resource, New York.
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Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 3
to cultivate connections to patrons and supporters of the arts and their institu-
tions. In many ways, this sort of semiprivate event mirrors modern fund-raisers
and by-invitation performances for patrons of the arts and educational institu-
tions. Like its modern counterpart, the event was intended to be publicized for
the benefit of both the attendees, whose social status would be elevated by their
increased cultural capital, and the professional musicians (and the composers
whose work they played), who would likewise gain status and publicity.
The second scene, however, bears fewer resemblances to modern practice, as
it depicts what I will describe as a truly private event—one that took place regu-
larly without listeners or attendees and that may or may not have been publicly
acknowledged. I have described here the scene painted by British artist Mary Ellen
Best (1809–91), who married a schoolteacher and made her home in Frankfurt
beginning around 1840 (see figure 0.2). In the painting Anthony Playing String
Quartets with Friends (1842–45), Best shows her husband in what must have been
a common scene in their home.1 Several later portraits depict family scenes in
which a violin or violin case is always nearby, as though casually put down and
picked up again throughout the day. (Because Best brought a fairly large dowry
to the marriage, Anthony gave up his teaching job and became a man of leisure.)
This image represents a more common practice in the nineteenth century but
one that has nearly evaporated at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In
the Romantic era, accomplished amateurs, or performers and musicians with
significant training who for various reasons pursued music as an avocation or

Figure 0.2 Mary Ellen Best, Anthony Playing String Quartets with Friends (1842–45).
Private collection / Bridgeman Images.
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 4 Introduction
hobby rather than as a profession, supported a rich and diverse ecosystem of musi-
cal activity. They attended concerts, performed in casual recreational capacities,
participated in more organized groups such as community choirs and orchestras,
and apparently bought sheet music in astounding quantities, as we shall see.
Music played an important role in the social life of the nineteenth century,
and music in the home provided a particularly convenient way to entertain and
communicate among friends and colleagues. String chamber music, especially,
fostered a variety of social interactions that helped to build communities within
communities. The basic question at the heart of this study is: What music was
available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what does that
music tell us about their musical tastes, priorities, and activities? In the course of
studying surviving examples from the period by both well-known and virtually
unknown composers and comparing those works with available information
about the distribution of sheet music and performances, several distinctive sub-
genres of string chamber music emerge, and they seem intimately connected to
particular social uses of music. Thus, an examination of the compositional aspect
of music production—the choices made by composers and arrangers—leads to
a more nuanced understanding of the social aspects of music consumption, and
vice versa.

Why Music for Strings?

String chamber music has long been neglected in studies of the Romantic era,
which have tended to focus on the piano and the orchestra, in part because these
fields feature innovative works by the most familiar and revered composers of the
age. The heroes of nineteenth-century compositional history wrote relatively few
string chamber works, and these do not in the main offer up radical innovations
or create new genres. They do not appear at first glance to represent a lively area
of ongoing activity. For instance, if we combine the string quartet outputs of
the canonic figures associated with Romantic instrumental music—Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Dvořák—we can count only twenty-six works over
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a seventy-year period, and more than half of those (fourteen quartets) are by
Dvořák alone. Thus it would seem that string chamber music production died out
after the 1820s, notably after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, who had both
been prolific string quartet composers. Carl Dahlhaus noted and dismissed this
lacuna in his Nineteenth-Century Music in 1989: “Not until the modern music of
our century was the history of the string quartet, which virtually seeped away in
the nineteenth century, resumed in representative bodies of works by Schoenberg,
Bartók, and Hindemith. . . . Thus, we have little cause to speak of a continuous
history of the string quartet after Beethoven and under his influence.”2
The present study, however, is not concerned primarily with creating a single
continuous history of chamber music after Beethoven. Certainly Beethoven’s

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 5
influence on the chamber music of some later composers is significant, but this is
merely one of many threads worthy of exploration. Without a clear understanding
of the other options available to composers and performers of string quartets, any
connections we discern between later composers’ works and Beethoven’s seem
almost perfunctory, rather than meaningful and communicative. Rather, I shall
focus on the relationship between the large and varied body of string chamber
works published in the nineteenth century and the communities they served.3
These communities differed in significant ways from those that chamber music
with piano addressed, and the composers of these works faced different sorts of
challenges and enjoyed different sorts of opportunities. Naturally, there is some
overlap between music lovers who performed string quartets or quintets and those
who participated in piano trios, quartets, and quintets, but I intend to show that
when a composer or a publisher created a string chamber work for the market-
place, he (nearly always he) addressed a social setting and group of participants
different from those he imagined when writing a piano trio or a wind quintet.
In the received standard history of the nineteenth century, the piano and its
proponents provide the neat framework for a narrative of musical developments
centered on technological progress and compositional innovation. The most
acclaimed composers of the first Romantic generation—Robert Schumann, Felix
Mendelssohn, Frederick Chopin, and Franz Liszt—began their careers as virtuoso
pianists, creating new genres and musical styles that partook of the technical and
expressive advantages of the developing instrument in the 1820s and 1830s. These
composers moved to other musical pursuits in subsequent decades, including
composing and conducting symphonies and large choral works; creating new
genres such as the tone poem; and promoting the work of other composers, such
as Mendelssohn’s “Bach revival” and Liszt’s advocacy for Wagner’s music dramas.
The standard narrative splits at this point in history. The history of compositional
developments follows the Romantic generation into the public arena, while the
history of musical life becomes concerned with the piano’s role in everyday music
making, especially with the musical activities of women in the home.4
Chamber music for strings resists easy incorporation into this dominant nar-
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rative for two reasons. First, chamber music’s association with musical conserva-
tivism and orthodoxy has colored its reception since at least the 1840s. Already
in the mid-nineteenth century, composer and critic Robert Schumann detected
a stagnation in the string quartet style of his day, fearing that if innovation did
not arrive soon, the genre would wither and die.5 One reason for string music’s
apparent orthodoxy lies in the fact that stringed instruments themselves experi-
enced only subtle organological changes in the nineteenth century in compari-
son to the piano or to wind instruments, which radically changed the timbre of
the orchestra in symphonic and operatic works. The instruments of the violin
family achieved a nearly perfected state of design in the mid- to late eighteenth
century, with only slight modifications after the 1790s. Although performers such

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 6 Introduction
as Niccolò Paganini created new playing techniques and opened new avenues of
expression, few composers responded to these developments with new genres,
and the vehicles for string-instrument virtuosity remained the familiar variation
set, sonata, and concerto. The stability or stasis of stringed-instrument design and
manufacture is reflected in compositional styles and generic conventions that did
not stray far from their Classical origins until the last decades of the nineteenth
century.
Observations that string chamber music remained essentially conservative in
its treatment of genre, form, harmony, and the like, however, also betray modern
historiography’s obsession with innovation. In creating a history focused solely
on radical changes by a few composers, we risk ignoring the elements of nine-
teenth-century musical life that made the period distinctive in favor of creating
a linear narrative of progress that ends in the present day. Lost in the process is
the original context and meaning of the few works that remain after historical
“pruning.” We regain some of that context and uncover new layers of meaning
by focusing instead on the music and musical activities that shaped everyday life
for professional and amateur musicians, sometimes highlighting compositional
breakthroughs that address particular social uses of chamber music, sometimes
exploring the qualities of seemingly “trivial” or conservative works that engaged
listeners and performers from a variety of backgrounds throughout the century.
Second, inasmuch as it is possible to construct a linear history of chamber
music in the nineteenth century, that history actually reverses the historiography
of piano music described above. In other words, the first half of the century saw
a flowering of social uses for chamber music that had not existed before or were
less common in earlier decades (including performance of transcriptions and
arrangements of larger works, such as those explored in chapter 2), and the major
innovations in musical style and new genres of chamber music appeared later
in the century. Although the instruments and genres of string chamber music
did not change much after the 1790s, their roles in musical life expanded rapidly
around the turn of the century and in its first three decades, encompassing a
larger percentage of the public. Composers made subtle adjustments to musical
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style within those conventional genres to suit the tastes and social situations in
which chamber music played an integral part. A more nuanced understanding of
chamber music’s dissemination in print and its use in social settings throughout
the period leads to a new image of the musical consumer and listener of the later
nineteenth century.
In writing about musical consumers and their use of chamber music, it is
important to note what we can and cannot know and what we must infer from a
variety of incomplete, sometimes contradictory, sources. Unlike public concerts
and theater performances, private gatherings of musical friends did not usually
produce a paper trail of tickets, subscription lists, programs, advertisements, or
concert reviews for modern-day historians to follow.6 Thus, the participants in

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 7
these gatherings have remained “invisible” to modern researchers, hidden from
posterity despite the powerful effect they had on musical life and thereby on the
more public forms of music making that flourished in the second half of the
century. The producers and consumers of chamber music did leave some traces
of their activities, however, in the form of published sheet music and business
records, which are explored in detail in chapter 1, as well as diaries, letters, auto-
biographical anecdotes, and public musings on chamber music in journals and
newspaper reports.
Despite the challenges it poses to the modern scholar, the privacy of chamber
music performance actually is one of the reasons that a clearer understanding of
it is so vital to nineteenth-century studies at large. The chamber genres provide
a unique opportunity to examine the music and ideas that the middle classes
chose to bring into their homes, the prized “private” space that played a much
more important role in self-expression during the nineteenth century than in
previous eras. Furthermore, because chamber music—especially string chamber
music—engaged multiple players in a conversational style or styles, it encour-
aged interaction within and outside the familial unit. Unlike solo piano music or
song, both of which privilege a single performer as the star, chamber music such
as string quartets and quintets allowed consumers to come together in leisurely
pursuits that spoke to their shared interests. The various styles explored by com-
posers for distinct audiences are differentiated first and foremost by the nature of
the relationships between parts in the ensemble. For this reason, I have chosen to
focus on works for three to eight players in the present study, eschewing duos and
sonatas and favoring the string quartet and related genres (quintets, occasionally
sextets) in order to get to the heart of social music making. In some instances,
works with piano are brought into the discussion as a useful point of comparison,
but the focus here is on string music and what it tells us about musical life in the
nineteenth century.
Throughout the book, I have drawn upon the evidence of actual communi-
ties where possible, such as documented meetings of performers who gathered
for weekly or occasional quartet parties. These are most common when dealing
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

with the activities of professional musicians who played chamber music in casual
get-togethers at home or while traveling in addition to performances they might
give as part of their professional obligations. Such accounts of recreational music
making frequently describe a mixture of professional and amateur players and
of upper-class and middle-class musicians. Although many of the gatherings
described involve professional musicians (i.e., men who made their living through
paid musical activities, including performance, teaching, and composition), they
demonstrate the importance of amateur music lovers to the sustained develop-
ment of music and musical life. They also confirm that string chamber music was
largely a male-exclusive activity. For example, chamber music parties hosted by
composer and cellist George Onslow (1784–1853), based in Paris during the social

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 8 Introduction
season and at his country estate just outside the metropolis during the summer,
included professional and amateur players, generally men. Onslow represents
members of the wealthy upper middle class who frequently mixed with the minor
aristocracy and with more obviously “middling” professionals such as violinist
Pierre Baillot and bassist Domenico Dragonetti, who visited the Onslow estate
for chamber music evenings. Onslow’s English father had immigrated to France
in 1781 and married a wealthy French woman, thereby gaining a life of leisure and
wealth through her dowry. George Onslow inherited their estate, which allowed
him to pursue music as an avocation, though he did publish with French and
German firms, and his works were performed in public concerts and in private
gatherings. Similarly, but at a lower socioeconomic level, Prague composer and
violinist Václav Veit (1806–64) held a professional position as president judge in
the city’s judicial system, but he published several popular string quartets and
quintets that reflect his own after-hours musical recreations, as we shall see in
chapter 1.
Louis Spohr’s, Felix Mendelssohn’s, and Robert Schumann’s chamber music
evenings feature in their correspondence and memoirs, and these evenings served
different purposes depending on the image each composer sought to project. In
Spohr’s case, the account in his autobiography (discussed in detail in chapter 3)
emphasizes the cozy country house that he purchased outside Kassel and the
music room he remodeled there; he and a few “friends of music” gathered to
play quartets and enjoy “a frugal supper.” His emphasis on the intimacy of the
gathering, the inclusion of families, and the informality of the event reinforces the
image of a bourgeois or middle-class lifestyle that Spohr promotes throughout his
book. On the other hand, Schumann’s descriptions of his gatherings (discussed
in chapter 4), descriptions that were published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
as a series of music reviews, emphasize the restriction of their quartet parties to
similarly progressive or radical male musicians for the purpose of exploring the
current state of the genre. In Mendelssohn’s case, correspondence about quartets
and quartet playing in his early years emphasizes his fascination with Beethoven’s
late quartets and his interest in following the revered master’s example in his own
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works (most notably in his first two quartets, opp. 12 and 13). Later references
involve more clearly casual or recreational performances with visiting musicians
at home and on his travels in Italy and elsewhere. The change in focus evident in
his performance activities is similarly reflected in his published works, such as
the sometimes maligned op. 44 quartets, with their “Classical” or conservative
orientation.
Throughout much of this book, analysis of the music that survives and critical
responses to it allows modern scholars to infer the type of audience for whom it
might be intended, based on evidence of activities that appear to have been wide-
spread, if underdocumented, such as in proposing the sorts of music that Anthony
Best and his friends might have played. Where evidence of specific gatherings is

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 9
available and where it is not, the work of Benedict Anderson offers a new way to
consider the importance of print in developing a network of musicians from a
variety of backgrounds throughout much of central Europe and Britain and the
different ways in which these intertwined communities used chamber music to
solidify their individual and group identities. He coined the term imagined com-
munity to describe a network of dispersed individuals who connect to each other
through a variety of media without necessarily meeting in person.7 We might call
them virtual communities or social networks in recognition of the similarity of
this concept to modern-day practices, in which readers and consumers connect
to like-minded colleagues, friends, and even celebrities whom they might never
or rarely meet face-to-face. In the nineteenth century, those virtual communities
included not just nations and nation-states, the focus of Anderson’s work, but also
social classes, schools of artistic thought and philosophy, and political parties that
transcended national and regional identities. Derek Scott’s book Sounds of the
Metropolis emphasizes that many characteristic features of nineteenth-century
popular music allowed it to be “exported” successfully to metropolitan and urban
centers throughout Europe and North America in part because the urban experi-
ence of life in Paris, London, Vienna, and New York, for instance, was very simi-
lar.8 Despite regional and national differences, the middle-class or working-class
musical consumer based in one of these cities would naturally have shared much
in common with his or her counterpart in any of the other cities, and therefore
each participated in a virtual or imagined community of city dwellers. The same
is true of genres that we label “art music” today, including instrumental chamber
music. Far from merely producing and purchasing a consumable product, middle-
class musicians used their leisure time to participate in the musical public sphere
through their private activities—including the composition, performance, and
publication of chamber music—much as they participated in the public sphere
of ideas through reading, writing, and conversation.9

The Middle Class Defined

Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The communities of musicians studied or proposed in this book share a variety

of characteristics despite the differences in taste, experience, or goals that their
musical activities sometimes addressed. All of the works considered here appear
to address members of the middle classes, who made up the larger proportion
of musical consumers and producers in this period. Professional composers,
performers, conductors, and music teachers of this era mostly came from some
segment of the middle classes or rose to that social status as adults. Likewise,
the music that they produced was primarily directed at middle-class (or upper-
middle-class) consumers with the resources to purchase sheet music, take music
lessons and buy instruments, perform in various capacities, and attend concerts.
Thus, it behooves us to consider just whom or what we mean when we say “middle

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 10 Introduction
class(es)” and how they did and did not differ from the aristocratic patrons who
facilitated musical life in earlier eras.10
Professional affiliations provide one useful way to circumscribe the middle
classes in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Enlightenment’s ideologi-
cal reforms and the gradual spread of the Industrial Revolution, individual and
group identities became more closely connected to professional identities, and
economic or working concerns increasingly colored other cultural values. For
the purposes of this study, the term middle class denotes families or individuals
without hereditary aristocratic titles who earned their livings through intellectual
or creative endeavors rather than through physical labor. This group includes the
upper echelon of the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, who, in their leisure pursuits
and everyday lives, did not differ very much from their aristocratic neighbors; in
fact, the bourgeoisie frequently interacted with titled nobility in the first half of
the century in some locales and came to replace them as a ruling class despised
by lower-class activists in the later decades of the period. This group frequently
owned or rented large homes and properties, where they might host musical
gatherings of various kinds. One example would be the factory owner or land-
owner who might maintain a townhome in the city where much of his business
was done, such as Birmingham or Leipzig or Marseilles, and a “country home”
in a suburban community nearby.
At the other end of the middle-class spectrum lie those individuals and fami-
lies whom we might separate from the working class by profession but who did
not fully “belong” to the well-heeled middle classes in other ways. For instance,
though schoolteachers in most of central Europe certainly earned a living through
their intellect and did not, for the most part, labor with their own hands, this
profession did not pay well enough or provide one with enough cultural cachet to
partake of all the benefits of middle-class life. School teaching served as a common
“gateway profession” between working-class and middle-class status. The son of
a shopkeeper or laborer might be sent to school and educated in hopes of raising
the family fortunes, and within two or three generations, that family’s descendants
might rise from laborer or servant to governess or schoolteacher to civil servant
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or bureaucrat. Between the landed bourgeoisie and schoolteachers, the core of

the nineteenth-century middle classes includes Europe’s wealthy merchants and
entrepreneurs, civil servants, university professors, bankers, factory and office
managers, doctors, and lawyers.11 These professions required and rewarded edu-
cation, rational thinking, emotional control, and hard work—traits that became
the guiding values of middle-class culture in the nineteenth century throughout
most of the Western world and its spheres of influence and that characterize
chamber music connoisseurship.
The European middle class established itself first and most firmly in urban
and suburban environments that supported the economic and working condi-
tions of their professions and provided cultural outlets for entertainment and

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 11
civic engagement. Not coincidentally, these metropolitan centers also fostered
the institutions of the growing music industry from the mid- to late eighteenth
century throughout the twentieth century. Cities such as London, Vienna, Paris,
and New York were the first places to maintain major publishing houses, opera
companies and music theaters, conservatories and professional music schools,
professional ensembles, and public concert series. Small towns and agricultural
areas did not support the associations and clubs or the social outings and cul-
tural events—including music industry—that made up the bulk of middle-class
leisure pursuits. They also could not support multiple manufacturing facilities,
universities, government offices, and retail and banking centers that employed
middle-class and bourgeois men. Whether in the great metropolises of London,
Paris, Berlin, and Vienna or in smaller cities such as Lyon, Marseille, Leipzig,
Dresden, Birmingham, and Edinburgh, middle-class life revolved around socia-
bility, active participation in public and private affairs, and commerce.
The rise of the middle classes and a distinctive middle-class culture cannot be
separated from the rise and fall of political and philosophical liberalism in Europe
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.12 Middle-class individuals
sometimes defined themselves in opposition to the aristocrats who governed
them, creating a culture that stressed “the principles of achievement and edu-
cation, work and self-reliance” to support “the emerging vision of a modern,
secularized, postcorporate, self-regulating, enlightened ‘civil society.’”13 But those
middle-class individuals also frequently sought to emulate those same aristocrats,
especially in cultural life outside of any political activity in which they might
engage. In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, members of what Ger-
man scholars call the Bildungsbürgertum, or the “cultivated bourgeoisie,” to use
David Gramit’s term, often interacted with the aristocracy in social gatherings.14
When the populations of the working class and the poor increased toward the
midcentury both in the countryside and in urban centers as peasants moved
from the land into factory work, members of the upper middle class came under
criticism for their role in what some critics saw as the hoarding of wealth and the
abuse of power.15 After the revolutions of 1848, constitutional monarchies and
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empires took or maintained control of central Europe, partly by establishing a

compromise with the middle classes. The establishment of unified, nationalist-
leaning governments created a wide swath of bureaucratic appointments and
opportunities for upward expansion, placing members of the upper middle class
in positions of power without displacing monarchs and dignitaries, who retained
ultimate control of their states. The expansion of empires across eastern Europe,
Africa, and Asia meant more government offices and oversight, creating more
administrative positions and jobs for educated white male members of the middle
classes—and opening social and cultural opportunities to the servants and women
who depended on them. Middle-class culture flourished in the second half of the
century throughout Europe, espousing the ideals of education, self-reliance, and

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 12 Introduction
self-regulation at the same time that many of its members worked to control and
“civilize” the peoples of the rest of the world under colonial rule.
These cultural and political concerns influenced the production, consumption,
and reception of music in the nineteenth century in a variety of ways. The asso-
ciation of some musical styles and genres with a privileged lifestyle, for instance,
has an important bearing on chamber music in this period. Around the turn of
the nineteenth century, chamber music allowed members of the middle classes
throughout Europe to engage in musical activities previously accessible only
to the aristocracy or to the very wealthy. Through arrangements and cheaper
publications, those of more modest means could experience the latest trends in
musical fashion and, at the same time, become acquainted with the most respected
works from music’s recent past (such as the quartets of Haydn and Mozart).
On the other hand, such musical activities were only accessible to members of
the middle classes who had the time and resources to pursue them, not to the
working class (such as household servants, laborers in various industries, factory
workers, clerks, etc.), who worked longer and harder for lower pay. The exclusiv-
ity of chamber music and its inappropriateness for the concert hall (or for the
larger halls that encouraged lower ticket prices) led some commentators later in
the century to associate it with the oppression of the lower class by those with
political and cultural power.
In the earlier stages of the middle class’s emergence, two main cultural fea-
tures distinguished it from the lower class (allying the middle class with the
upper class) and made its members recognizable to each other: education and
leisure. Education defined as cultural literacy—a familiarity with art, music, and
literature—formed the foundation of “respectable” society in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries and continues to influence cosmopolitan culture
in the twenty-first century. A thorough background in what we now term the
liberal arts or humanities was favored by the middle classes because it supported
their goals of public engagement and employment in the intellectual arena. It
served the double purpose of fostering academic and moral development on a
personal level and providing the knowledge and skills necessary in business at
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the professional level. A common educational background also smoothed social

interactions between casual acquaintances. Classical references or the discussion
of important or new artworks and inventions featured prominently in conversa-
tions and correspondence. This emphasis on education also contributed to the
canonization of certain texts and artworks as the most significant and representa-
tive examples of genres, styles, and artists. The canon of works that continues to
dominate modern conceptions of sophistication in cultural life (in music, paint-
ing, literature, and architecture) jelled in the nineteenth century in response to
the variety of influences and interests that guided middle-class life at that time.
Members of the middle classes frequently gathered for music making with new
friends and acquaintances both at home and abroad or in the countryside. The

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 13
ability to contribute to a musical evening or to converse about music intelligently
was, like dancing, a required social skill.
This educational paradigm supported the professional aspirations of the mid-
dle classes, but it also highlights the other main signifier of their status, which
is the availability of time and resources to pursue leisure activities. A classi-
cal education separate from specific technical or vocational training included
philosophy, literature, painting and art appreciation, musical tutelage including
some composition, mathematics, architecture, and science—largely “impractical”
areas of inquiry. It allowed members of the upper middle class to demonstrate
their worldly detachment from the stuff of everyday necessity. Education and
educational pursuits—including, for the young man whose family could afford
it, the Grand Tour—represented a necessary luxury of the leisured class, which
flaunted its achievements through participating in clubs and scientific associa-
tions, attending and participating in performances, and collecting artifacts and
artworks.16 Middle-class culture outwardly scorned ostentatious spending and the
accumulation of wealth for its own sake, but educational and self-improvement
pursuits, including music, provided an acceptable means to demonstrate status.
The outward separation of work and leisure resulted in a new emphasis on
domesticity and domestic life centered on the nuclear family, with clearly defined
roles for men, women, and children.17 Organization of life into public and private
worlds emerged when the economic and educational or civil professions became
profitable enough to free certain individuals and their families from creating the
materials of survival such as growing, preparing, and preserving food; building,
cleaning, and maintaining the home; and spinning thread, weaving cloth, and
sewing clothes. Members of the middle classes purchased these goods and ser-
vices from retailers and servants, leaving those who had done these tasks in the
past to supervise from a social and literal distance. This development has often
been portrayed as affecting mainly women, whose “accomplishments” (arts and
crafts, music) filled otherwise idle hours, facilitated courtship and sociability,
and improved marriage prospects. But men, whose work usually only required
them to be in or near the office during the daytime hours—often between 9:00
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and 6:00, with several breaks for meals, walks, coffee, reading, and other leisure
activities—also found themselves in need of occupation at home, where little or
no work awaited them at the end of the day.

Masculine Leisure in the Private Sphere

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a “separation of spheres”
into a gender-coded binary system of public life involving active male participants
in government and commerce, and private life built by and around the female
observers and beneficiaries who provided a sanctuary for publicly active men.18 This
model, however, fails to consider the role and venue of masculine leisure activities

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 14 Introduction
in this period. Increasingly throughout the century, men required opportunities
to gather outside work without attracting pressure from the authorities, especially
during periods when censorship restricted men’s ability to gather in public due to
the perceived potential for political uprisings. During these times—for instance,
during the July Monarchy in France (1830–48), in Biedermeier Vienna (1815–48),
and in the contemporaneous “Vormärz” period in Prussia—men’s associations
and clubs were monitored by the local authorities, and impromptu political and
philosophical discussions in coffeehouses or other public venues were discouraged
when not banned outright. During these decades, domestic music making and
other activities primarily engaged the nuclear family because larger gatherings
of more diverse groups aroused suspicions from the police. As scholar Carol
Harrison has shown with particular reference to the French citizens of smaller
cities like Besançon and Mulhouse, middle-class and upper-middle-class men of
nineteenth-century Europe needed spaces in which they could socialize together
without compromising their social standing. With the emphasis on leisure as a
sign of status and independence, men required recreational activities that filled a
variety of “requirements,” including sociability, self-improvement, learning, and
masculinity. Such pursuits could not be satisfactorily developed at home, in the
smallish spaces of middle-class townhouses, which in accordance with middle-
class values of modesty and self-control could not be grandiose. These pursuits
also required distance from the feminine and feminizing domestic environment.
Thus, middle-class men formed associations and clubs (cercles) for entertainment
and leisure in semiprivate, semipublic settings, such as the private salons and
upper rooms of taverns and restaurants, the rented spaces of civic buildings, and
the specially built lodges and headquarters for leisure associations. This tradition
of the male club had been an important aspect of cultural life for the leisured
classes in the eighteenth century, and it expanded in the nineteenth century. In
German-speaking realms, the need for class segregation and semiprivate male
sociability resulted in an increase in Masonic and other lodge cultures and “secret
societies.”19 In the upper middle class’s larger homes or country estates, separate
rooms and suites accommodated men and their activities so that they, too, could
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

achieve this distance. In the musical world, this sort of activity is best represented
by the proliferation of associations for music, including both the Gewandhaus
orchestra and concert hall in Leipzig and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in
Vienna. Both institutions began with the support of amateur music lovers from
the wealthy middle classes in the late eighteenth century and gradually moved
toward professionalism after the mid-nineteenth century.20
Particularly in relation to domestic musical activities, private music making has
tended to remain associated with women performing in their own homes, espe-
cially with women playing keyboard instruments and singing. Countless manuals
and journal articles from the nineteenth century outline the specific duties of the
domestic woman regarding music, dictating that she should play music to soothe

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 15
her husband and family, to entertain guests, and to teach her children the art.
Men’s participation in domestic music has usually been portrayed in fiction and
in scholarship as a part of courtship, with four-hand piano music providing an
especially convenient way for the sexes to interact in a chaperoned environment.
When men performed music in their own leisure time outside the structure of
courtship, though, they generally eschewed the keyboard, favoring instead those
instruments that were taboo to women for much of the period, the string and wind
instruments. Thus, chamber music for strings provided the leisurely outlet that
middle-class men needed, allowing them to engage in nonprofessional activities
that were at the same time associated with learning and accomplishment (and,
increasingly, with a growing nationalist pride in Austro-Germany).
Anecdotal evidence of string chamber music performance indicates that it
remained a clearly male-dominated activity through the nineteenth century until
at least the 1870s, possibly as late as the 1890s. Despite a few noteworthy excep-
tions, women musicians typically participated in chamber performances as pia-
nists, as singers, or as listeners.21 Christina Bashford, using evidence from diary
entries, memoirs, published advertisements, journal articles, and domestic fiction,
has demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of amateur string chamber
music performances in nineteenth-century Britain involved only men. Bashford
points out that music making was portrayed or understood in eighteenth-century
and Victorian England as an effeminizing endeavor, in contrast to the more obvi-
ously virile male pursuits (hunting and riding, sports such as rugby and rowing,
etc.). Thus, upper-class and middle-class men in Britain frequently downplayed
their chamber music pursuits in their public representations of themselves (i.e.,
in letters and memoirs that would be read by later generations) while continuing
to play music in private and semiprivate scenarios.22 Richard Leppert’s land-
mark study of music and imagery in England also notes that portraits of English
gentlemen feature stringed instruments more often than others (though, oddly,
never in performances of string quartets or other chamber genres) and that these
portraits often provide other visual clues to contradict the possible feminizing
effect of music, such as ceremonial swords, military uniforms or other insignia,
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and paintings in the portrait’s setting of horses and the hunt.23

Throughout Europe, male musicians worked to ensure that their activities were
understood as cerebral and worth male attention and constructed their activities
as distinctive from female musicking, helping to create (or exacerbate) the divi-
sion between serious chamber music and trivial salon or parlor music.24 Harrison
notes the same tendency in France: “The music of a gentlemen’s association could
not have been confused with feminine, domestic performance. Most societies of
the first half of the century stressed instrumental music. . . . Musical associations
generally disdained simple piano accompaniment: they aspired to performing
symphonic or opera scores.”25 Notably, anxiety about music’s possible effeminizing
effect is less apparent in the Austro-German and eastern European regions, where

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 16 Introduction
music was a natural part of the education of boys and young men. University life
often included casual and organized musical performances, where students were
encouraged to play instruments and sing together, as well as to attend concerts
and performances of music in domestic and public spaces.26 For the upper-class
and middle-class men of central Europe, at least, this engagement with music
in their formative years continued as they matured and took on leading roles in
industry, politics, and culture as adults.
Iconography of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries corroborates the
notion that middle-class and upper-middle-class men were especially associ-
ated with string chamber music, or vice versa. I have already described what
is perhaps the most famous image of string chamber music in action from this
period (Carl Johann Arnold’s Quartettabend bei Bettina von Arnim, from 1856).
A similar portrayal of the Saint Petersburg composer and violinist Alexei Lvov
(1799–1870), who also composed the Russian imperial anthem adopted in 1833,
depicts the male quartet seated around a table in a small residential room with
three visible listeners (see figure 0.3). Lvov, a military officer and later aide-de-
camp to Tsar Nicholas I, provides another example of the porous boundaries
inherent in the study of middle-class musical life and of chamber music in the
nineteenth century. His father was a professional musician, and Lvov had les-
sons in violin and composition from an early age, but he attended the Institute
of Communications as a young man and pursued a career as a civil engineer
while also sometimes performing on international tours with his string quartet.
Lvov hosted private concerts at his home in Saint Petersburg that featured visit-
ing artists and his own performances. Although he enjoyed an elevated status
in Russian social and political life, Lvov belongs to the broadly defined “upper
middle class” rather than the aristocracy because of the nature of his professional
life outside of music, and an important aspect of his day-to-day experience was
the recreational and semiprofessional performance of string chamber music.
Nancy November has explored string quartet iconography and the insights it
can give us about nineteenth-century listening practices, especially regarding the
dominant forms of “serious” music and listening practices.27 She suggests that
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

French and German musicians present two very different modes of listening and
promote somewhat opposing roles for the quartet in musical culture. The French
appear more concerned with individual performances and the effect made on the
listener by the visual, theatrical display of the players, while the Germans seem
more interested from an early stage in propagating a distinctly intellectual, “deep
listening” approach based on “the work itself.” As November notes, the German
approach has become pervasive in modern assessments of chamber music and
its composers, rendering alternative listening and performing practices—and the
compositional styles associated with them—to be dubbed lesser by comparison,
beginning, perhaps, with the most famous account of male quartet playing from
the nineteenth century, by Richard Wagner.

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 17

Figure 0.3 Paul Rohrbach, Alexei Lvov’s String Quartet (1817–after 1862). Fine Art
Images / SuperStock.

Though not associated with the composition or performance of chamber music

himself, Wagner made a singularly influential contribution to the male encoding
of string chamber music in the nineteenth century. The opera composer’s well-
known indictment of French musical understanding, “On German Music,” pub-
lished in the Parisian Gazette musicale in 1840, featured an imagined or ­idealized
domestic performance of string quartets as its centerpiece. This passage is often
quoted as an example of the ideal German domestic scene occurring in every
household on the other side of the Rhine, and it probably does describe a common
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family ritual in Germany and elsewhere at the time. In the context of Wagner’s
morality tale, though, it serves a very different purpose, focusing on capable ama-
teur composers rather than performers. The passage in question follows a lengthy
description of “the lot of hundreds” of underappreciated musicians in Germany,
who die unknown with their talent unacknowledged by the public. This being
the case, Wagner claims, thousands of capable musicians did not bother to take
on such a burden of professionalism.
They rather choose a handicraft to earn their living, and give themselves with
all the greater zest to music in their leisure hours; to refresh themselves, grow
nobler by it, but not to shine. And do you suppose they make nothing but
handicraft-music? No, no! Go and listen one winter-night in that little cabin:

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 18 Introduction
there sit a father and his three sons, at a small round table; two play the violin,
a third the viola, the father the ’cello. What you hear so lovingly and deeply
played, is a quartet composed by that little man who is beating time. But he is the
schoolmaster from the neighboring hamlet, and the quartet he has composed is a
lovely work of art and feeling.—Again I say, go to that spot, and hear that author’s
music played, and you will be dissolved to tears; for it will search your heart,
and you will know what German Music is, will feel what is the German spirit.28

Note that this passage does not focus on the performance of the work, though it
is “lovingly and deeply played,” but on the fact that the quartet was composed by
the local schoolmaster and that his amateur creation is “a lovely work of art and
feeling” rather than mere “handicraft-music.” In this and later passages, Wagner
portrays the true German spirit embodied in middle-class cultural values: mod-
est, devout (though, for Wagner, devotion belongs to Music rather than any other
deity), law-abiding and eager to please, learned and engaged in an intellectual
pastime. The genre that best exemplified these qualities for Wagner and, perhaps,
for his readers in France and elsewhere was the string quartet.

Chamber Music at the Intersection

of Public and Private Life
As suggested in the previous sections, chamber music existed at the intersec-
tion of professional and amateur performance and of serious and recreational
music making. This was part of its appeal to various consumers and producers
in this era, but it complicates the convenient binaries used by modern scholars to
understand the Romantic era. Perhaps the most vexing of those is the notion of
a clearly delineated private and public life. The gendered “separation of spheres”
into a feminine private or domestic space and the inherently masculine public
space has been critiqued in a variety of disciplines in the past ten years or more,
but it remains stubbornly pervasive in music history because of the specialized
circumstances that live music performance creates. Music scholars have tended
to rely solely on the venues for performance to characterize music and musical
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activities as “public” and “private.”29 But as I’ve already suggested, opportunities

for masculine leisure (and thus for string chamber music) tended to include
events in what I will call “semiprivate” and “semipublic” spaces. These include
recreational playing outside of the home but in a highly regulated space, such
as an exclusive club or fraternity or a rented space. Frequently, house parties or
house concerts and gatherings of friends and colleagues to play or hear chamber
music fall into the semiprivate category because they involve listeners other than
the performers and required an invitation. As opposed to truly private perfor-
mances, intended for the pleasure of the performers alone, these semiprivate
events might also take place as practice runs for an upcoming performance or
tryouts of a new work, in addition to performances “merely” for entertainment.

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
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 String Chamber Music and Its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century 19
Thus, semiprivate events, as described in this study, include performances where
a few listeners are invited, but tickets and press coverage are not involved. In
other instances, a “concert” or a “reading” at the home of a well-to-do patron
(aristocratic or upper middle class) would attract more listeners, and it might
even be written about in the local press, with some indication of the program.
Although these events were not “public” in terms of open access to all, they also
were not “private,” as they formed an important part of the public presentation
of music and had a strong effect on the public images of the participants. Thus, I
refer to them here as “semipublic.” We might also place subscription concerts in
this category, as events that required tickets and were publicly known but highly
exclusive and inaccessible to those without a significant connection to the orga-
nizers or performers. Finally, when the word “domestic” comes into play in this
study, it will mean primarily music happening in the home of at least one of the
participants—in a private context, usually without listeners.
The “public sphere,” though, also embraces a variety of activities beyond public
concert hall attendance. It includes not just the visible activities that middle-
class participants created en masse but also the public dissemination of ideas,
especially via print media. The explosion of print during the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries allowed the formation of public life in ways that have
been both celebrated and decried. The “reading mania” that hit Europe’s middle-
class consumers at this time has been lauded as a sign of increased literacy and
engagement in some quarters at the same time that the novel was then (and is
now) described as a trivial genre, filled with trite moral messages and allegories
of conformity. Print media, in the form of journals and newspapers, broadsides,
pamphlets, books, and other reading materials, created the public forum in which
ideas could be shared and debated over a growing geographical sweep.30
In the musical world, printed music and printed reviews in journals and news-
paper feuilletons served the same purpose, allowing composers and performers
(both amateur and professional) to share ideas and to communicate in an open
public forum from their posts throughout Europe.31 Publishers of music, like
their counterparts in the book trade, recognized that the public sphere included
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

a variety of individuals with disparate but overlapping needs and tastes. The
music they produced reflects those tastes in the choice and treatment of genres,
as evidenced by the “easy” or “light” piano trios and violin duos that proliferated
in this period. More subtle manipulations of musical style within genres likewise
demonstrates attention to the needs of consumers; performer- and casual lis-
tener–friendly quartets and quintets feature repetition and predictable harmonic
patterns, for instance, whereas composer- or critic-oriented quartets flirt with the
boundaries of musical convention. The chapters that follow demonstrate several
examples of these different subgenres within the world of string chamber music.
The circulation of printed materials was particularly important for the devel-
opment of chamber music because newly composed chamber works were rarely

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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 20 Introduction
performed in public venues. String quartets and other chamber genres did occa-
sionally appear on public concert programs beginning early in the nineteenth
century, but orchestral and solo virtuoso works made up the bulk of the public
concert repertoire. Concert series devoted to the performance of chamber music
in Paris have been chronicled by Joël-Marie Fauquet, Jeffrey Cooper, and others,
and chamber concerts began to make a foothold in the middle of the century,
but these series focused on the masterpieces of the late eighteenth century, par-
ticularly Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with only the occasional inclusion of
a newly composed work.32 They provide at best a partial picture of the cham-
ber music world of this time, demonstrating a growing connoisseurship for late
eighteenth-century music throughout the nineteenth century and representing
a concert hall ideal that would eventually come to dominate concert life by the
turn of the twentieth century.33 Similar developments governed chamber music
concerts in London, where series organized by John Ella and the Musical Union
or the Beethoven Quartet Society promoted quasi-religious contemplation of
music in quiet settings aided by extensive program notes.34
The complex of expectations that have attended the rise of the “modern” concert
hall ritual has caused modern musicians to overlook a wealth of material from
the nineteenth century that indicates a vibrant, engaged public for string chamber
music. By holding all works and events to the same standard of contemplative
listening, learned displays of musical logic or counterpoint, and seriousness, we
reduce the string quartet and related genres to a highly selective group of works
that, as the following chapters show, do not represent the whole of nineteenth-
century musical experience and that, perhaps more importantly, do not address
the many aspects of this music that made it inviting to amateurs, professionals,
and listeners in the first place.
Although the public concert became a dominating force in musical life dur-
ing the nineteenth century, the primary “audience” for whom many composers
wrote in the first three quarters of the period was not a listening audience gath-
ered at a professional performance. Rather, composers’ public consisted of the
critics and music lovers who would purchase and review (and play) their works
Copyright © 2015. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

throughout Europe. Nineteenth-century music lovers sometimes used chamber

music as a pleasant diversion, as a learning and teaching tool, and as a social
ladder. Printed music, like the printed word, connected them to each other and
to the wider world, creating and supporting a diverse collection of communities
within communities, a plethora of options that allowed musicians of all sorts to
find their personal niche in the musical world of their time.

Sumner, Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music : Composers, Consumers, Communities, University
of Illinois Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3440676.
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