Up to roughly the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe, musicians were servants of either the Church or the nobility. This situation gradually changed in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth because of the increased wealth resulting from the industrial revolution, the development of an affluent middle class, and the Enlightenment ideas embodied in French and American Revolutions and Republics.
The status of the musician changed as a result of a larger cultural shift, that of the emergence of bourgeois individualism brought about by Enlightenment ideas and, more specifically, by a change in the employing institutions, the audience and the technology. The importance of the concepts of audience and public was part of the early Enlightenment aesthetics as reflected in the works of Joseph Addison (The Spectator) in England, Johann Mattheson (Der Vollkommene Capellmeister) in Germany and Jean-Baptiste Dubos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture) in France.
These concepts led to the change of the function of music concurrently with the change of the musician’s status. The Kappellmeister to a church or a court wrote music for the entertainment of his employer and guests. Music was written for a specific occasion and for a known patron. That was still very much the framework in which Haydn worked. But over the length of the eighteenth century, next to music written for a specific occasion and a specific patron, there developed music written for home, concert hall or theater, available through the development of the music printing business. Composers became aware that they were writing for a public they did not know. Music started to be written for posterity. The violinist Felix Radicati upon being shown Beethoven’s quartet op. 59 remarked “Surely, you do not consider these works to be music?” Beethoven famously retorted “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age”. As music emancipate itself from occasional performance and became available in new markets through the printing press, thus transcending time and locality, so did the musicians emancipated themselves from their role as servants.
It is England that led the development of musical careers outside the homes of the nobility. The fact that the political regime was not an absolute monarchy and that there was a rich mercantile society allowed for the development of entrepreneurial concert-givers making the power of the public and the audience more evident. Handel’s enterprise of opera and oratorio is a case in point. In fact, London’s eighteenth-century cultural life with its newspapers, theaters, subscription concerts and public pleasure gardens offered many more opportunities to independent musicians than that of Paris or Vienna at that time. The practice of publishing music through subscription soon led musicians to adapt it to concert-giving. A series of concerts would be sold as a package by a society or a prominent musician. In England, Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel set up such subscription series in 1765. It was followed by Concert of Ancient Music (1776), the Professional Concert (1785) and the Salomon concerts (1791-1795) and eventually the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1813.
More commonly than subscription concerts, were concerts given by local music societies all over Europe, which were made up primarily of amateurs under the direction of professionals. The earliest is that formed by Telemann in Hamburg in 1713. In Paris public concerts were given by the Concert des Amateurs (1769-1781) and the free-mason supported Concert de la Loge Olympique (1780-1789). The society with the longest history is the academy of Leipzig, which drew its members mostly from the university and its directors from the Thomas Kirche; it began on an informal basis in 1700 and became a society named Grosses Concert in 1743, performing in a tavern called the Three Swans until 1781. The mayor and the city council renovated one story of the Gewandhaus (literally the Garment House - a building used by textile merchants) for the use of the orchestra. There from 1781, it gave public concerts and became known as the Gewandhausorchester. By the middle of the nineteenth-century it had become a fully professional orchestra and is today one of the oldest German orchestras founded by the bourgeoisie, as opposed to originating from a courtly orchestra.
In Vienna, the situation was quite different. In the eighteenth-century Vienna achieved prominence as a musical center because of its court orchestra, the Hofkapelle. The Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) and his Italian wife Eleonora Gonzaga established the Imperial court in Vienna as a center of European baroque music. They were also responsible for establishing the first noteworthy link between the Vienna court and Italian musicians, a link that would continue for another two centuries. Eleonora Gonzaga began the tradition of attending the opera and ballet performances during special celebrations of the Imperial family. Furthermore, Emperor Ferdinand II was a powerful actor in the Counter-Reformation. He and his successors of the Habsburg dynasty managed to suppress Protestantism in their hereditary territories by fostering a culture of baroque Catholicism through a close alliance between the Catholic Church and the dynasty. From the end of the sixteenth century an extensive network of Catholic parish schools developed in Austria and Bohemia encouraged by Ferdinand II, who closed Protestant schools, exiled their schoolmasters, and mandated the instruction of the parish youth in the basic articles of the Catholic faith and in music. Musical ability was a prerequisite for obtaining a position as schoolmaster/sacristan. Such was the distrust of the German print culture and the fear of Protestant proselytizing using the printed vernacular, that the Church relied more heavily on the visual, sensual, and theatrical media fostered by baroque Catholicism than teaching people to read and thereby risking their reading the German (Protestant) Bible. It is only with the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the latter part of the eighteenth-century that reading and writing were universally taught in the parish schools. This accounts both for the richness of musical life in eighteenth-century Austria and for its very small contribution to German literature, despite the fact that Vienna was then the largest German-speaking city in Europe.
Over the next 100 years under the emperors Leopold I, Joseph I and Charles VI the Hofkapelle grew in size reaching 134 members in 1740. Empress Maria Theresa put an end to this growth in 1746 by dividing it into two organizations: the Hofoper (the imperial opera) and the Hofkapelle which was responsible for all other music production. In the wake of the growth and importance of the court orchestra was the development of private orchestras, Hauskapellen, in the palaces of the upper nobility. These private ensembles were composed of domestic servants with musical abilities who performed double duties. The rise of Hauskapellen followed the example set by the court. In turn, minor nobility unable to support a full orchestra and singers would sponsor a Harmonie ensemble (a wind band). Thus, the sponsoring of music ensembles was a social marker, a status symbol, and became a convention that was expected from the nobility. When the Hofkapelle’s importance was diminished under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the Hauskapellen also went into decline, allowing for a different form of music patronage to flourish: that of the dilettante salons and the mainly amateur public concerts.
This new organizational structure opened opportunities for independent musicians to supplement their teaching income. To quote Morrow in his book Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: “The practice of giving formal private concerts in the home began to trickle down the social scale, with the lower nobility and the wealthy middle class assuming an increasingly active role. By the end of the (eighteenth-)century, the musical salon had become firmly entrenched in the Viennese cultural world, so that all segments of the population who had the means to participate in the city’s cultural life at all could have access to at least one or two musical coteries.”
In addition to the salons, public concerts started to be organized. An exclusively professional orchestra was the Tonkünstler-Societät. It was founded in 1771 by Florian Gassman and strongly supported financially by the nobility. Its purpose was to support the widows and orphans of the Viennese musicians. It gave two performances at Easter time and two performances before Christmas. It lasted until March 9, 1939 when the Nazis abolished it.
Another series of exclusively professional orchestral concerts, the Künstlerverein was organized by Franz Lachner in 1833 with the orchestra of the Hofoper, but it was short-lived because of Lachner’s departure from Vienna in 1834 to become Kapellmeister in Manheim.
Along with the opportunities of playing in the musical salons, professional musicians took part in concerts organized by the nobility or wealthy amateurs or by visiting virtuosos/composers called Akademien. But all these public concerts contained a high proportion of amateurs. One of the most durable early public concerts was the Augarten concerts organized by a largely amateur orchestral association. It was an annual series of about 12 summer concerts given on Thursday mornings. They began in 1782 and continued until 1811. From about 1795 they were directed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh who, because of his close association with Beethoven, programmed many of his compositions, notably his first five symphonies and his piano concertos performed by Czerny and Ries.
In the winter season 1807/08 a new series of public concerts was mounted. They were given in the Mehlgrub concert room and were initially directed by the banker and accomplished amateur violinist von Herring. They moved in 1808 to the University Hall under the direction of the virtuoso professional violinist Franz Clement. Because of the Napoleonic wars and the occupation of Vienna by the French troupes these concerts did not last very long for lack of support.
On November 29, 1812 a huge public concert in aid of the victims of a fire at Baden (a city 25 km from Vienna) was given by a chorus of 280 and an orchestra of 310. The program was Handel’s Alexander’s Feast in the orchestration of Mozart. This was the impetus behind the founding that same year of the Gesellschaft des Musikfreunde in Wien (also known as the Musikverein). Its founder was Joseph Sonnleithner, general secretary of the Court Theater in Vienna and the author of the libretto for Beethoven’s Leonore of 1805. The purpose of this Society was to promote music in all its facets. It accomplished its goals by sponsoring public concerts, founding the Vienna Conservatory in 1817, today renamed University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, abbreviated MDW), founding the Wiener Singverein in 1858, constructing the Musikverein building in 1870 and systematically collecting and archiving noteworthy music history documents.
In this quick overview of public concerts in Vienna between the end of the eighteenth-century and the first part of the nineteenth-century, it must be emphasized that most public concerts involved a great number of amateur musicians. As the size of orchestras for public concerts increased in the first part of the nineteenth century so did the proportion of amateurs. While the professional orchestras of the theaters and opera houses numbered about 45 players in 1844, the public concerts of the Musikverein included upwards of 80 players. Consequently, the quality of orchestral playing was mediocre. A writer in the Allgemeine Music Zeitschriften in 1800 wrote of Vienna: “There can be few cities where amateur musical activity is so universal as here. All play, all learn music. Naturally there are some excellent dilletanti among this great multitude; but they are not so common as before. People regard music too lightly, as if it were to be learned in passing, they believe they can do everything immediately, excusing themselves ultimately with the word Dilletante, and take the whole thing more as a matter of gallantry and correct social behavior.” Matters did not improve much, as a pupil of Spohr, Michael Frey, reported in 1815/16 of a musical evening in a private home: “They did not once hit their notes, played completely out of time and were so complacent about it that they could certainly not hear it. The only other violin was played by a member of the orchestra of the Theater an der Wien. He was the best of a bad lot.”
There are political and economic reasons for the continued use of amateur musicians in public concerts. Because of the expenses incurred in the war efforts against Napoleon, from 1799 on inflation set in as the government printed far too many banknotes to finance the war. Despite various measures to curb inflation by 1811, the value of the currency had dropped to 1/5 th of its former value and the occupation of Vienna by the French troops did nothing to help the local economy. It is only in 1818 that inflation was finally halted, although the price of certain commodities, in particular housing in Vienna, continued to rise. In this context, it would have been prohibitively expensive to sustain a fully professional orchestra's giving public concerts; hence the great proportion of amateur musicians engaged in these ventures.
This however does not account for the observed increase in the size of the public concert orchestras during the first part of the nineteenth-century. The public concerts in a period of tremendous social and political upheaval – the Napoleonic wars, the occupation of Vienna, the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, the rampant inflation and rising costs - provided a forum where public and performers could share their common interest and love of music and reaffirm their national belonging. With the return of peace in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, followed by the gradual stabilization of the money, the revival of the economy, and an institution training professional musicians (the music Conservatory), all the elements were in place in 1842 for the successful establishment of a fully professional orchestra's giving regular public concerts in Vienna: The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
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