Re-examining Salon Space: Structuring Audiences and Music at Parisian Receptions

Abstract Historians have viewed nineteenth-century music salons in Paris as concert-like environments where performers and audience gathered in a designated music room. Architectural studies and first-hand accounts, however, show that the music salon incorporated multiple reception rooms, and that guests frequently listened to musical performances from adjoining spaces. While conceptual space has been a subject central to salon studies, this project analyses material space, re-evaluating how the architecture of the salon influenced audience structure, listening modes and compositional practices. This architecture was ultimately central to the development of salon opera, which flourished between 1850 and the 1870s and was epitomized by Gustave Nadaud’s Le docteur Vieuxtemps (1854).