Rethinking Salon Music: Case-Studies in Analysis

Nineteenth-century salon culture has received important attention in recent years with regard to examining the nature and function of the salon as an institution, together with notions of the salonesque. Social gatherings of this kind provided for the participants a semi-public, non-commercial and inclusive space. Typically music played a key role in the gatherings; however, the extent of its cultivation, and the compositional and technical degree of complexity involved, varied according to the individual circumstances. While, on the one hand, Robert Schumann in 1841 dismissed ‘salon music’ as too sentimental and intellectually dull, on the other hand Johann Christian Lobe warned in 1853 that we should not generalize about the music performed in salons. Lobe supported his plea by giving examples of salon music possessing more than ephemeral qualities: he instanced Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Weber’s Aufforderung zum Tanze Op. 65, Schubert’s marches for four-hand piano, and Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte. Lobe’s list and Schumann’s concerns point to two problems: first, the definition of ‘salon music’ is far from clear; and secondly, the range of aesthetic and technical aspects related to musical performance in salons is diffuse. Ballstaedt attempted to capture the nuances of the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’within this context by differentiating between ‘music for the salon’, consisting of light-hearted music composed for the purpose of entertainment, and ‘music in salons’, encompassing all music which could be heard