And Beethoven, meanwhile, was the most esteemed composer, the man whose music might not (in our terms) make the pop charts, but whom all the sophisticates (including Rossini) admired. It wasn't surprising, then, that when Rossini came to Vienna in 1822 to premiere his opera Zelmira (a work just about forgotten today), he went to see Beethoven.

As Rossini describes it, the visit might as well have been a pilgrimage. There could easily be some exaggeration here; Rossini told the story to Richard Wagner many years later, we know of it from a description of Wagner's visit with Rossini written by Michotte, a Frenchman who'd introduced the two. It's hard to believe that -- between Rossini's telling of the tale and Michotte's retelling of it -- there wasn't some embellishment.

But there's certainly lots of truth. Rossini, the great worldly success, visits Beethoven, the distracted, melancholy artist living in a messy room, with rain leaking through its shabby roof.

The portraits of Beethoven [Rossini supposedly said]...reproduce fairly well his physiognomy. But what no etcher's needle could express [did Rossini really use those words?] was the indefinable sadness spread over his features -- while from under heavy eyebrows his eyes shone as from out of caverns, and, though small, seemed to pierce one.

Beethoven, upon being introduced, got right to the point. "Rossini, you, the composer of the Barbiere di Seviglia? ["The Barber of Seville," a very light comedy, and to this day Rossini's most popular piece] My congratulations....[But] do never try your hand at anything but comic opera." Rossini's companion, who unlike Rossini knew German, said (or rather wrote in Beethoven's notebook, because Beethoven was deaf), "But the maestro Rossini has composed numerous serious operas," including, as the companion might have said, the one he'd come to Vienna to premiere.

Beethoven brushed that off. He'd read through the music of these serious works; he had no use for them. At least he was gracious enough to wish Rossini success with Zelmira, but as the visit ended, and he walked Rossini to the door, he couldn't help repeating his judgment: "Above all, do a lot of 'the Barber'" And there we have it: the confrontation between popular and classical music, 19th century style. The two sides of the divide seem closer, then, than they do now. Beethoven and Rossini at least both wrote for the same musical instruments, and the same kinds of voices; it's not like what we'd see today, in which someone like Beethoven would compose for a symphony orchestra, and someone like Rossini would use synthesizers and electric guitars. But to people living then, the gap in fact was huge, and for Beethoven, Rossini was only good for light entertainment. Rossini himself acknowledged the difference; he makes Beethoven seem almost like a suffering god.

For a more global description of what was going on, nobody does it better than William Weber, a historian who's made a special study of these things:

With the simultaneous collapse of the patronal tradition and the rise of the printing industry, musical taste suddenly went to extremes of levity and seriousness. [Other historical factors, too, were involved, including the evolution I described in the last episode toward thinking of music as the highest of all arts. But most important of all, as Weber establishes elsewhere, was the rise of the middle class, which provided the audience for the newly emerging popular music, and who also bought the sheet music that music publishers were printing.] At one pole stood the virtuosi, those entrepreneurs who created a fire-storm of popular demand for music they advertised as "brilliant but not difficult," music which piqued the ear but made no demands upon the mind. Facile virtuosity was the order of the day, and only a few of the virtuosic corps -- chiefly Lizst and Paganini -- were later to make it into the standard repertoire....

At the opposite pole were the musicians and supporters of newly founded symphony orchestras who attempted to maintain the tradition of learned music-making and became fanatic devotees of the German classical school....For most bourgeois throughout Europe, Beethoven and Mozart were regarded as approachable only by esoteric minds. But in the meantime, the members of this musical world forged the concept of "The Masters." In so doing they fashioned the values for seriousness and learning which were eventually to become the basic tenets of European concert life.

Debates between these two schools, Weber also says, can seem surprisingly modern; "Reading an article comparing Thalberg [one of leading virtuosos] and Beethoven one might think that it had been written a hundred years later, but setting Elvis Presley against the German master." [I only wish Weber had quoted some of this!] The virtuosos, in effect, were pop stars. Liszt invented the solo piano recital, a concert focused on him and only him. He'd walk around between pieces, and talk to friends in the audience. When he came to a city to play, he might be met by huge crowds, and get carried on their shoulders into town. Women retrieved his cigar butts, and wore them around their necks, close to their skin.

Opera was also a central part of popular music back then, and in opera houses -- above all in Italy -- people might be roused to a frenzy. Here's a description of a typical Rossini premiere from a Rossini biography written by Stendhal, the great French novelist. This is one of those marvelous books (I've quoted from it before, in episode nine), in which the digressions are just as important -- and even more fun than the narrative. Nobody takes the book seriously, any more, as a biography; many of the facts in it are suspect, reported simply on hearsay. But as a document of Italian opera at the start of the 19th century, written by an opera-mad intellectual who was also one of the liveliest and most amusing writer who ever lived, the book is a treasure. There's nothing like it for showing what opera back then felt like, or how people thought about it.

Here's the Rossini premiere, taking place in any town in Italy. All emphases are Stendhal's:

As the overture begins, you could hear a pin drop [which of course isn't what would happen at most performances; but there was such curiosity about a new opera, specially written for the town where it was premiered, that everyone listened intently]; as it bangs its way triumphantly to an end, the din bursts with unbelievable violence. [No sane composer would end an overture quietly!] It is extolled to high heaven; or alternately, it is whistled, nay rather howled into eternity with merciless shrieks and ululations....[T[hese are men possessed of seven devils, determined at all costs, by dint of shrieking, stamping and battering with their canes against the back of the seats in front, to enforce the triumph of their opinion, and above all, to prove that, come what may, none but their opinion is correct...

Each aria of the new opera, in its turn, is listened to in perfect silence; after which, the cataclyism is let loose once more; and the bellowing of a storm-tormented sea is nothing but the deeblest comparison. The audience makes its opinion of the singers on the one hand, and of the composer on the other, distinctly audible....Rossini rises from his seat at the piano, his handsome face assuming an unwonted expression of gravity. He bows thrice, submitting to storms of applause, and deafened by a most unlikely variety of acclamations, for whole sentences of adulation may be flung at his unresisting head; after which, the company proceeds to the next item.

The critical evening arrives at last. The maestro takes his seat at the piano [this would be Rossini; customarily the composer sat at the keyboard, in the orchestra, for the first three performances of a new opera, perhaps playing the music, to help keep the orchetra together]; the auditiorium is stuffed to bursting-point ...As the hour of the performance draws hear, the town seems like a deserted, hollow shell; the passions, the wavering hopes and gfears, the entire life of a whole thriving population is focused upon the theatre.

Stendhal notes that no such craziness would be seen in Paris, where people eyed each other cautiously, too vain to shout any opinion other people might not share. Italy took these things to extremes, in part because of the famous Italian temperament; in part because there wasn't any entertainment in Italy, nowhere to go at night, except the opera; and in part because Italy had no classical music, hardly any performances of Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven. But other, more sober European cities certainly had their own popular music, and Vienna (to cite just one example) could boast the waltz dynasty of Johann Strauss Senior and Junior, whose orchestras played three concerts a week, played also for private balls, and went on tour in Europe and even America.

These popular music performances were frequent, fun, jammed with people, and (with perhaps the exception of Italian opera orchestras) musically accomplished, especially the virtuosi. But classical music presented a different picture. For an extreme (and extremely comical)vignette, look at the Concerts of Ancient Music, founded in 1776 in London, which I e-mailed my subscribers about a couple of weeks ago. (That's one of the benefits of subscribing: You get things not necessarily included in the book episodes. To subscribe, click here, and write "subscribe to the book" in the subject line of the e-mail form that'll appear.) Note, by the way, the early date. Classical music didn't emerge all at once in the 19th century. Like anything in history, it evolved gradually, and the seeds of it had already started to grow as the 18th century ended.

Nor was this organization entirely representative of the classical music groups that formed later on, and played Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The Concerts of Ancient Music concentrated on sacred music of earlier eras, and eventually got stuck in a Handel rut, which contributed to their demise around 1840. But the group had other problems:

-- It was dominated by aristocratic amateurs, who were terrible musicians. Performances were so bad that many people laughed.

-- It wouldn't play any music less than 25 years old.

-- For a long time, its leaders thought that the piano was an illegitimate, upstart instrument. They wouldn't allow it at their concerts until as late as 1837.

-- They didn't like Haydn, because they thought his music was too witty to be serious.

But other classical music organizations, in other European cities, including London, shared at least a few of these problems. Almost all of them were amateur, and so performances -- though reverent -- might not be very good. Professional performances eventually evolved, but very slowly at first. In the 1820s, the director of the Paris Conservatory, François Habaneck, organized the first of the Mozart and Beethoven performances which later would grow into the Society of the Concerts of the Conservatory, eventually famous as the best classical orchestra in Europe. But the first concerts were given in Habaneck's home.

The Vienna Philharmonic, also a professional orchestra that played classical music, was established in 1842, but in its first years, it hardly ever played. By 1848, it had given only 14 concerts, while Johann Strauss, Sr., had played more than a thousand. In the 1845-46 season, there were 157 popular music concerts in London, and only 44 classical events. In Paris and Vienna, the numbers were similar -- 239 popular music concerts in Paris and only 25 classical, in Vienna 100 popular music events and only 18 classical.

Slowly, though, the genres started to blend (something I'd love to know more about; if anyone knows any sources for more information, please e-mail!). Each side found something to envy in the other. People who loved classical music (I'm using this term, of course, with its early 19th century meaning) envied the far more accomplished performances in popular music concerts. And as the prestige of classical music spread, popular musicians, like Liszt, began to be rebuked because they didn't play enough Beethoven. The classical masterworks, apparently, started to seem less forbidding, even to the popular music audience. Did Italians who heard no melody in Mozart (as Stendhal recounts) learn to hear differently? Apparently they did. Certainly if you follow Verdi's operas, from his emergence in a Stendhal-like Italian opera world in the 1840s up to Falstaff, his joyful last opera, in the 1890s, you hear (again in 19th century terms) less popular music and more classical music, which means that the later operas don't rely on uninhibited melody as much as the earlier ones do, and that in every way they're more complex. Their musical flow is more complicated, their musical ideas are more subtle, and their orchestral sound is far more varied.

William Weber says that the novelty of virtuoso performances wore off, after a while. I can also imagine that the emerging middle-class popular music audience -- the families who bought pianos and sheet music, and whose daughters played music for guests in the evenings -- became more sophisticated, or at least wanted to seem so. It wasn't hard, as time went on, to learn to like symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, and, even if you couldn't manage that, you wouldn't want people with more education and higher status to make fun of your taste.

Besides, maybe in some ways the dividing lines weren't so strict. Rossini, after all, did pay homage to Beethoven. Classical concerts weren't completely austere. Here's something a German critic noticed at a classical concert in 1837:

The author saw how -- in the fourth movement of Beethoven's C Minor Symphony [the Fifth], when a violin passage traveled down from the highest to the lowest like ka rip -- the gentlemen of the orchestra entered into a community with the public, that they exchanged glances, forgetting all customary form.

Classical audiences had to be taught not to talk or applaud while the music was playing. And the teaching wasn't always successful. People applauded during the first-movement solo cadenza at the premiere of Grieg's Piano Concerto. Even at the most elevated, most solemn musical shrine in all Europe, the theater Wagner built in Bayreuth for performances only of his own deeply serious operas, people (at least in the theater's early days) interrupted the music with applause. (To Wagner's horror, of course).

But still the ideals of classical music spread. As the 19th century progressed, concerts concentrated more and more on the music of the past. Between 1815 and 1825, at concerts by one of Vienna's leading musical organizations, 77 percent of the music was by living composers and only 18 percent by dead ones (nobody knows the death dates of the composers who wrote the remaining five percent of the music). By 1849, the percentages had almost exactly reversed. In Paris, during the 1860s, at the Conservatory Concerts I mentioned earlier, living composers supplied just 11 percent of the music. (I think, by the way, that there might be something wrong with something I said in episode nine, about Brahms playing mostly old music when he ran a prominent Vienna musical group. I found that tidbit in Jan Swafford's impressive Brahms biography, but how much is "mostly"? Swafford makes it seem as if Brahms conducted very few new pieces. But the New Grove Dictionary says that by 1878, fully 25 percent of the pieces played were new. The Grove entry doesn't mention Brahms, but Brahms led the group in the 1870s.)

Here's a striking vignette that shows popular music merging with classical music. It comes from the chapter on 19th century listening that opens Peter Gay's book The Naked Heart (the fourth volume in a study of the 19th century bourgeoisie). Gay quotes Berlioz -- who saw himself as a classical composer, taking classical music to new places -- as he describes Liszt playing Beethoven on two very different occasions:

[Berlioz] recalled that he had once heard Liszt ruining Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with extraneous trills, tremolos, and embellishments. [This, of course, would have happened in Liszt's popular music days, when he wanted to astound his audience and only occasionally played anything by Beethoven. The Moonlight Sonata was apparently -- just as it is now! -- one Beethoven piece a popular music fan might enjoy.] But in a later recital, Liszt showed himself more pious as he performed the same piece for a small group of friends. It was late in the afternoon, and the lamp was going out. Berlioz welcomed that; he thought the dim twilight would be right for the opening adagio movement of the C-sharp minor sonata. [Which is still the most familiar part of the piece, the part that almost everybody recognizes.] But Liszt went him one better: he asked that all the lights be extinguished and the fireplace covered. Then, in total darkness, Berlioz remembered, "after a moment's pause, rose in sublime simplicity the noble elegy he had once so strongly disfigured; not a note, not an accent was added to the notes and the accents of the author. It was the shade of Beethoven, conjured up by the virtuoso to whose voice we were listening. We all trembled in silence, and when the last chord had sounded no one spoke -- we were in tears.

Liszt had come over to classical music. Or, as William Weber puts it,

That shrewdie Franz Liszt certainly saw which way the wind was blowing; in 1849 he stopped giving concerts and moved to Goethe's Weimar [or in other words to a city strongly linked to high art, because the great writer Goethe had lived there], where he began writing symphonies in his own serious way and ended up joining the Augustinian order.

There's one emendation I need to add here. As the 19th century wore on, the choice wasn't simply between classical music and popular music. Unconventional young composers like Berlioz and Wagner started to form an avant-garde, which Liszt became part of. Weber isn't quite right to say that Liszt wrote "symphonies." He wrote pieces that came to be called "symphonic poems," pieces organized not -- like a classical symphony -- almost entirely in purely musical ways, but instead shaped around the telling of a story. To the classicists, who included post-Beethoven composers like Mendelssohn, Schumann, and eventually Brahms, the avant-garde could seem cheap and unstable; to the avant-garde, the classicists seemed stuffy. The composers in the avant-garde certainly were classical, in the sense that they didn't even remotely write popular music (using the term, as always here, in the 19th century sense). But they thought the old musical forms, the forms used by Mozart and Beethoven, were now obsolete, and had to be replaced by something much more organic and modern. Nobody should underestimate the tension between the classicists and the avant-garde. Brahms and Wagner, it's well know, were wary of each other (though Brahms, more open-minded than his rival, admired some of Wagner's work). But, far beyond that, Liszt once famously put down Schumann, and Schumann openly -- and utterly -- despised Liszt.

So where did this lead? Directly to the classical music world we know today, in which the old-time classical music rules have completely taken over. We listen in silence; we worship the great composers; we think concert music ought to be complex and lofty. There's just one thing, though. Somehow we've brought the popular music of the 19th century -- insanely silly Rossini operas, flashy Paganini concertos -- into the classical pantheon, and this doesn't make any sense. Our classical music world hasn't just lost touch with the culture around it; it's forgotten its own past.

In the next episode: the rise of modernism, and how that made classical music even more classical

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Citations:

Beethoven and Rossini: O. G. Sonneck, ed., Beeethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries. New York: Dover Publications, 1967, p. 116

"With the simultaneous collapse": William Weber, "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 8, No. 1 (June, 1977), pp. 5-22.

Elvis: William Weber, Music and the Middle Class. New York: Holmes & Meyer Publishers, 1975, p. 20.

Roasini premiere: Stendhal, The Life of Rossini, Richard N. Coe, trans., second edition. London: John Calder; New York: Riverrun Press, 1985, pp.118-19.

Strauss Senior and Junior: "Strauss (1) Johann (Baptist) Strauss" Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 9/24/06), http://www.grovemusic.com

Concerts of Ancient Music: Music and the Middle Class, pp. 61-66; p. 148 n9.

"classical music didn't emerge all at once": See for instance William Weber, "The Eighteenth Century Origin of the Musical Canon," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 114, No. 1 (1989), pp. 6-17

concerts given in Habaneck's home: Music and the Middle Class, p. 70]

Vienna Philharmonic: "Vienna," §5 (ii), Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 9/24/06), http://www.grovemusic.com

numbers of classical and popular music concerts: Music and the Middle Class, p. 159

cigar butt: this is in Alan Walker's Liszt biography; I'll have to find the precise reference

Liszt rebuked: Music and the Middle Class, 60

novelty of virtuoso performances wore off: "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870."

Beethoven violin passage: quoted in Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 93. The passage Bonds quotes comes from an essay published with no name attached in the musical magazine edited by Robert Schumann, the Neue Zeitschrift fürMusik. But, Bonds says, a note on the contents page attributes it to Wolfgang Robert Griepenperl.

taught not to talk: see for instance Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume IV. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, p. 19ff

Grieg concerto: I read this in CD liner notes. I'll have to find the precise citation.

applause at Bayreuth: Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights at the Opera. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 270

percentage of living and dead composers: "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870."

25 percent new music in Vienna: "Vienna," §5 (ii), Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 9/24/06), http://www.grovemusic.com

Liszt and the Moonlight Sonata: The Naked Heart, p. 28. Gay doesn't say where the Berlioz quote comes from. He only says that he found it in Alessandra Comini's book, Changing Image of Beethoven.

that shrewdie: "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870."