We need to step away from the foregone value judgements associated with the term Biedermeier, domestic music, and mass production – all encapsulated in the pejorative use of the term Hausmusik during the nineteenth century. This book uncovers the varieties music-making connected with the domestic music of this era – which are invariably left behind by modern musicologists in favour of a focus on individual, canonic, and original compositions. To understand opera in the Viennese home, it is helpful to consider the values that became attached to Biedermeier domesticity, especially social formation, domestic stability, and wholistic education. In revaluing Viennese opera arrangements of this era, it is also worth considering how they inspired public-sphere agency extending beyond domesticity. This chapter discusses quantitative aspects of piano-opera arrangement culture in Czerny’s Vienna and reasons for the boom in pianos, pianists, and associated publications. It then turns to qualitative considerations, looking at the ways in which these piano-opera arrangements promoted the agency of listeners, arrangers, performers, and women in particular.

The period c.1780–c.1830, covered by this book, was a high point in the ‘fruitful age of musical translations’ (Beethoven). This trend was driven partly by the social and political circumstances, which made private and semi-private music-making particularly feasible and appealing, creating a demand for chamber music that was within the reach of the enthusiastic amateur. But the vogue for arrangements was also a function of the music publishing trade and its governance (or lack of it) around 1800. This chapter explores the vogue for opera in Vienna from the perspectives of composers, then through the lens of publishers’ catalogues, considering which types of opera and which composers were most liked, and how opera (in various ‘musical translations’) infiltrated into Viennese homes around 1800.

This chapter investigates various strands of influence, seeking to understand the role of musical ‘domestication’ in canon formation in the early nineteenth-century Viennese home. Answers are sought to fundamental questions: how the performance of music in the home influenced the creation of an authoritative list of musical ‘works’ to be championed in public; which genres were thus canonised, and how opera, which dominated ‘domesticated’ music, fared in the developing canon; and who were the ‘authorities’ and ‘publics’ in Vienna around the time of the Congress (1814–15 and just afterwards). The chapter focuses on middle-class circles, especially the salons that Leopold von Sonnleithner held and attended. Thanks to middle-class agency, repertoires were perpetuated and recreated, rethought and re-evaluated through musical arrangement and domestic performance. So in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, concert life would develop in significant areas – repertoire, performance practices, and listeners’ behaviour, tastes, and values – all of which developed largely in the middle-class home.

This chapter explores the people at the centre of the vogue for opera arrangements in Vienna around 1800, the amateurs who bought, organised, and performed operas in their homes. It considers the profiles of Viennese amateurs, including class and gender, and the meaning of ‘amateur’ (Liebhaber, or ‘dilettante’) in Viennese music-making around this time. It first considers how we trace the musical amateurs in question. Sources regarding private-sphere activities, including published accounts of amateur musicians and music, are considered in this chapter. One-off published lists, which group amateurs or ‘dilettantes’ active in Vienna with their instruments and voices, and reviews of arrangements destined for amateurs, help understand the Viennese amateur in terms of skill level and gender. These accounts have to be read with care, though, as they tend to emphasise the excellence of the Viennese; and they were compiled from sources such as word of mouth, personal knowledge, and newspaper advertisements – certainly not random sampling of the population of musical Vienna. The music itself is analysed in several ways for what it says about amateurs’ identities and skills.

This chapter explores Viennese salons, where arrangements were performed in early nineteenth-century Vienna, and the purposes they fulfilled, such as fostering sociability and advancing social and aesthetic understanding. It examines how various types of opera arrangements extended the meaning and experience of public concert-going. They could allow domestic performers and listeners to engage with ideas about political freedom, class, and nationalism that were being raised in the Viennese salons more generally. Audiences for opera in Viennese salons could listen to works with revolutionary themes and potentially politically inflamatory plots that would not be tolerated in other art forms or more public venues. The chapter considers three prominent female ‘arrangers’ who were significant agents in rearranging the social order in early nineteenth-century Vienna: Fanny von Arnstein; Caroline Pichler; and Maria Theresia von Paradis. It discusses the musical and literary activities they organised, and the degree to which class and gender mixing persisted in their more or less private music-making, especially through the vehicle of musical arrangements.

This chapter explores why, in an era so strongly associated with Beethoven and Schubert, Rossini’s music was such a hit in Vienna, looking at the contribution of opera in the home to this popularity. Opera arrangements spread Rossini’s music around a wide public even before public performances were staged. Hit numbers such as ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi were performed over and over in Vienna, in various venues and with various combinations of instruments and voices. The ‘judges of German art’ decried his work in newspaper reviews; but this did little or nothing to dampen the market’s enthusiasm. Sales of Rossini’s operas rocketed, as publishing catalogues from the era demonstrate. The popularity of Rossini, fuelled via opera arrangements, is linked to those aspects of Rossini’s music that the critics decried, especially repetition, noise, genre blurring, and theatricality. The thirst for arrangements that promoted and exacerbated these aspects is linked, in turn, to the context of surveillance and censorship in which the contemporary Viennese found themselves, and related to Habsburg politics and the Metternich System.

This study takes a novel approach, privileging opera arrangements over original operatic compositions, and the perspectives of amateur performers over those of composers. Several studies of opera arrangements from the era in question have already been published, which focus on particular composers or particular arrangement forms; and the emphasis lies on arrangements’ function as reception documents. This study differs in considering arrangements’ multiple functions, and ‘end users.