At first glance, Figure 0.1 might be taken for a performance of original chamber music, not opera; and today we might be inclined to see male dominance rather than female leadership. But the facts behind it are almost certainly quite otherwise. Johann Sollerer’s depiction of private-sphere music-making in Vienna in 1793 shows a sextet of five male musicians around a woman seated at a fortepiano, almost certainly playing an arrangement of Papageno’s aria from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’, led from the fortepiano played by a woman. Not only the instrumentation, especially the flute, but also the larger context points to this.

Figure 0.1 Chamber Music, colour etching by Clemens Kohl after Johann Sollerer, Vienna 1793.

Courtesy of Archiv, Bibliothek und Sammlungen der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, shelf mark Bi 1815

In 1802, Ludwig van Beethoven called his era a ‘fruitful age of translations’, referring to the vogue for arrangements of public music for performance in the home.Footnote ¹ Of all the many arrangements of various types of music produced in Vienna in his era, opera arrangements enjoyed the greatest popularity and were arguably the most ‘fruitful’ in terms of their variety, utility, and dissemination. So, for example, in Johann Traeg’s Viennese music catalogue of 1799, opera arrangements in their various forms more or less take over the chamber music section. And Die Zauberflöte, which was particularly popular at this time, appeared thirty-five times in the catalogue, in nineteen different kinds of musical arrangement.Footnote ²

The musical arrangements discussed in this book are mainly translations of operas into chamber music for small-scale ensembles, which was the most common type in Vienna around 1800. These opera arrangements include many without text and many more with text, the latter mainly for piano. The final chapter refers to the increasingly heavy emphasis on piano as the preferred medium for arrangement in the early to mid-nineteenth century; and to the increasingly loose relation between the original work and music derived from it, like the then tremendously popular variations, potpourris, paraphrases, and fantasies based on operas.

Scholars have often ignored these opera arrangements or dismissed them as second-rate. But they offer a unique window on a mostly hidden world of richly diverse amateur music-making, and especially on women’s roles. This study takes a novel approach, privileging opera arrangements over original operatic compositions, and the perspectives of amateur performers (defined more closely in Chapter 2) over those of composers. Several studies of opera arrangements from the era in question have already been published, focusing on particular composers or particular arrangement forms; in these, the interest lies in arrangements’ function as reception documents.Footnote ³ This book differs in that it considers arrangements’ multiple functions, and ‘end users’ – salonnières and performers, rather than the original composers. Two questions drive the study: what were the cultural, musical, and social functions of opera arrangements in Vienna c.1790–1830? And what does this culture of musical arrangements tell us about musical and social ideals and agency in this period, particularly as they concern women?

This book explores the performance and functions of opera arrangements in Vienna over fifty years around 1800, roughly from 1781 (when Mozart arrived in Vienna) to 1827–8 (when Schubert and Beethoven died). The final chapter considers the period immediately thereafter. Vienna around 1800 is nowadays mainly seen as the seat of high-Classical culture, and the start of the Romantic era in music. The idea that musical works demand fidelity to the original, in performance and study, is part of a package of modern assumptions.Footnote ⁴ But this dominant understanding of Viennese music in fact emerged gradually,Footnote ⁵ eclipsing other approaches to musical works and musicality which are explored in detail in this book. Although a reviewer from 1829 decried musical arrangements as ‘derangements’ and an ‘epidemic addiction’, he also recognised them as a productive, transformative part of musical culture.Footnote ⁶ Opera arrangements fed into key developments in Viennese music culture at this time, including musical institutions, concert life, the role of women in music-making, and emerging ideologies, such as serious listening and the concept of the musical work. Opera arrangements destined for private performance by amateurs helped keep operas in performance and in listeners’ minds; in these ways they also contributed to canon formation.

Amateur music-making has remained hidden to us because music historians since the mid-nineteenth century have concentrated largely on public-sphere musical phenomena: the formation of the classical canon of music and the emergence of concert life.Footnote ⁷ This emphasis on the public sphere became central to Western music histories, and persists. But it is particularly unrepresentative of Vienna c.1800, where large public assemblies, including symphony concerts, were often forbidden. Instead, Viennese music-making flourished in the home both before and after the Napoleonic Wars, in the social isolation caused by invasion, surveillance, censorship, and a cholera epidemic. And much of this Viennese domestic music consisted of arrangements – especially of operas, but also of ballets, concertos, symphonies, and so on – although scholars of chamber music focus almost exclusively on original compositions.Footnote ⁸ Even researchers focusing on nineteenth-century arrangements have missed the critical potential of arrangement studies by generally maintaining the ‘composer-and-masterworks’ paradigm.Footnote ⁹ They emphasise canonical composers (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and genres (the symphony). And there is a focus in previous scholarship on arrangements from the later nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰

This book offers critical insights into the complex interrelation of public concert life with private and semi-private music-making,Footnote ¹¹ revising our understanding of these spheres, and reinstating the central importance of the roles played by women.Footnote ¹² Focusing on Viennese musical amateurs, such as the novelist Caroline Pichler and intellectuals like Fanny von Arnstein, I consider opera arrangements not as inferior versions of original operas but as cultural goods in their own right with important social functions, such as enhancing people’s well-being through social interaction and fostering women’s cultural ownership.Footnote ¹³ The book’s emphasis is on middle-class music-making, allowing for the fact that this term is broad and nebulous, and that social mobility was prevalent among the Viennese who might be thought to belong to this group. Indeed the culture of arrangements might have helped in climbing the social ladder, as I discuss in Chapter 4. In Chapters 5 and 6, I make a distinction between the upper echelons of the middle class on the one hand – who had the time, money, and influence to put on relatively lavish musical salons – and, on the other hand, the considerably larger number of musical amateurs who could afford to engage in music-making in the home, but not on a large scale or via regular salons. Opera arrangements offered amateurs agency in respect of education, entertainment, and sociability in the home, and a bridge to public music-making. This was particularly valuable to female amateurs, who otherwise had little say or share in the public spheres of music composition, criticism, and orchestral performance, or indeed in public life more generally.Footnote ¹⁴

A focal point of the study is the performance of opera arrangements in the Viennese musical salons, where salons are defined as regular heterosocial gatherings of intellectuals, artists, patrons, and professionals, meeting primarily to pursue sociability, as well as knowledge, through music-making. This definition encompasses most of the private and semi-private gatherings that took place in Vienna around this time, although not the numerous, largely undocumented instances of family music-making and small gatherings of performers with no audience present.

Nineteenth-century salon culture in Berlin, England, Paris, and Weimar has been researched; but these studies have seldom extended to Vienna, or to the culture of arrangements.Footnote ¹⁵ Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff look at musicians in Berlin, and Cypess takes account of arrangements. David Wyn Jones provides some suggestive insights on Viennese women’s roles in musical culture.Footnote ¹⁶ And Freia Hoffmann discusses the effect of gender on the choice and meanings of instruments in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ I extend these perspectives in a detailed account of amateurs’ agency in Viennese musical culture in these years, through the vehicle of opera arrangements.

Vienna mirrored trends and developments in other important centres of salon culture around this time, including those in Berlin (particularly due to family connections between salonnières: Fanny von Arnstein and the Itzig family, for example), and in France. In Viennese society around 1800, salons developed in response to the rapidly changing sociopolitical situation, a process of change that was paralleled elsewhere at different times and in different ways. But in Vienna, a strand of continuity emerges among changes and differences: there was an abiding taste for performing opera ‘in private’, and in many and various arrangements.

To understand why this sort of performance took place, and how typical it was, evidence needs be triangulated. I establish key people and situations to clarify the agency exercised by amateurs, and the function performed by arrangements in Viennese society c.1790–1830. In the foreground of this picture are the consumers: influential Viennese musical amateurs like Arnstein and Pichler, and also middle-class men like Leopold von Sonnleithner and Raphael Kiesewetter. I explore these amateurs’ dealings with non-human vehicles of agency – the arrangements themselves – and with other key agents in this culture: composers, publishers, reviewers, and arrangers. I compare men’s roles with those of women, considering how the network and dynamics of relationships change in this era.

Thus the evidence I analyse includes not only musical works, but a broad array of documents, attesting to manifold actions, intentions, and interactions. Little-studied sources such as iconography, instruments, letters, memoirs, music-instruction manuals, and music collections afford insight into the identities, musical involvements, and tastes of amateurs. I discuss music catalogues as evidence of opera in the home, and then consider salons for which particular repertoire is documented. There are very few salons (or any other kinds of venue for musical performances in the home) for which specific arrangements are mentioned. Most of the specific information as to repertoire relates to the later period covered by this book: the 1810s and 1820s.

Pulling back the curtain on this evidence reveals an extensive part of social and musical life that is highly significant, but probably quite new to the modern reader. To obtain a rounded picture, the book circles around this evidence, looking at it from different perspectives, while moving forward in a broadly chronological fashion. Chapter 1 focuses on the perspective of composers, and starts to build up a sense of the operas that were most popular in various arrangements around 1800. Chapters 2 and 3 centre the musical amateurs, with particular attention to women in Chapter 3. The emphasis shifts to publishers in Chapter 4, with a consideration of the role of domestic arrangements in establishing the systems of opera canon formation. Chapter 5 then returns to the amateurs, now considered as ‘the market’, exploring the forces that led to the Rossini vogue in 1820s Vienna. Finally, the perspective of arrangers comes to the fore in Chapter 6, Czerny’s in particular. The overall effect of this approach is to recentre the home in Viennese music history in the crucial years when public concert life was developing, and to see its inhabitants as key agents and influencers in musical life at this time.

This book concerns cultural history, but analysis of the opera arrangements themselves is central. These arrangements are the main lines of evidence of what was played, by whom, and with what degree of skill. The arrangements reveal the priorities and needs of people of the time. Studying them helps us to answer cultural and sociological questions about Vienna around 1800, building on the work of Jones, Alice Hanson, Mary Sue Morrow, and Tia De Nora.Footnote ¹⁸ The focus of the musical analysis is on illuminating aspects of agency using representative Viennese opera arrangements from the period. Arrangements studied in detail represent both canonical and lesser-known works, and both well-known and anonymous arrangers. I compare the chosen arrangements with their original versions, and investigate the ways in which arrangers translated large-scale, public works to accord with the wishes and values of amateurs who made music in domestic contexts.

This research complements the work of Edward Klorman on ‘multiple agency’ in chamber music. He considers how chamber musicians conceived of their musical actions and agency as they played.Footnote ¹⁹ Workshops with performers formed part of the research for this book, allowing me to take account of the authority of performers as creative agents by considering where the arrangements left room for the performers’ own interpretations – of such aspects as instrumentation, technique, performance style, the addition of sung or spoken text, and even staging.

The book offers an ‘alternative’ history of opera, to balance a history that to date has been centred on public performance, when it considers performance at all. It is a counterpart to the studies of Mary Hunter, James Webster, and several others, who wrote seminal books in the 1990s elevating the importance of opera buffa in late eighteenth-century Viennese musical life.Footnote ²⁰ This book puts more emphasis on opera performance and functions in cultural life than the 1990s scholarship did; its context opens up the repertoire, including opera seria, to a fuller exploration of its meanings. Finally, I open the drawing-room door onto a major space for opera around 1800 – we start to see not only who was listening to and performing opera, and how widely, but also how and why. Exploring the domestic cultural space allows us to glimpse the motivations and agency of women and of amateurs, especially since the Viennese salons were a primary site for their performance and afforded pathways to leadership roles in the musical public sphere.